A Bibliometric Analysis of Laboratory Safety: Its Significance for the Discipline of Chemistry

Laboratory safety is a multidisciplinary field of research that is highly significant for science education, and especially for the discipline of chemistry. This study addresses the developments, primary fields of study, and research tendencies related to the scope and application of laboratory safety in chemistry. The study utilized a survey research design from among descriptive methods and applied a bibliometric analysis technique. To this end, a total of 279 works published on laboratory safety between 1965 and 2024 and indexed in the Web of Science database were analyzed. The analyses encompassed 60 countries, 279 publications, 51 authors, and 43 subject categories. Findings were analyzed using VOSviewer via the bibliometric analysis method. According to the obtained results, the country with the highest number of relevant publications is the United States, the institution with the highest number of published articles is the University of California system, the journal with the highest number of articles is Journal of Chemical Education, and the researchers with the highest numbers of publications are Nancy L. Wayne and Xiaoyan Wang, followed by Imke Schröder, James H. Gibson, and Xinglong Jin. Although many researchers study the subject of laboratory safety, it is seen that the cooperation among authors is extremely weak. The most commonly used keywords were identified as “laboratory safety,” “safety hazards,” and “laboratory management.”