Scientific Mapping Analysis and Research Progress of Metro Safety Studies Based on CiteSpace

Metro safety accidents have caused a large number of casualties, property damage and traffic congestion. In order to reduce the occurrence of metro safety accidents and to improve the level of metro safety management, it is of great practical significance to analyze the knowledge structure and hot research in the field of metro construction and operation safety. This study takes 179 articles related to metro safety research included in the core database of Web of Science from 2012–2022 as the research object. Based on the theory of knowledge mapping and CiteSpace software, the analysis about metro safety research was carried out by visualizing the development trend, cooperation network, keyword co-occurrence and research hotspots. The results show that the number of articles published on metro safety research has increased rapidly since 2017; the core group of authors and relevant research institutions are relatively fragmented; the research hotspots are focused on “subway station network”, “safety monitoring”, “deep foundation pit”, “subway fire”, “flood risk”, etc. In the future, it is worthwhile to deeply explore in the research field on data and intelligence of metro safety studies.