Bibliometric Analysis of Oil and Gas Pipeline Safety

The safety issue of oil and gas pipelines has attracted more attention. In this research, the bibliometric method has been applied to analyze the research hotspots and trends of oil and gas pipeline. Base on the Web of Science (WoS) Core collection database, a total of 2164 papers on pipeline safety published from 2004 to 2022 were collected. The distribution of research forces and the hotspots of pipeline safety study have been analyzed. The obviously increasing number of annual publications from 2004 to 2021 also indicates that the safety issues of pipeline transportation have attracted more and more attentions. Although China has obvious advantages in the total number of publications, total citations and h-index, the average number of citations per article published in China is less than most of rest in the top 12 most productive countries. In this study, the network visualization and cluster density visualization have been used to explore the research status and trends based on the database of Web of Science. Obviously, the main contents of pipeline safety research are divided into four clusters. In addition, the co-authorship of the collected papers has been studied to track the research dynamics of related institutions. The result shows that the international cooperation in the study related to pipeline safety is widespread from the perspective of the co-authorship of the paper.