Construction safety and health hazard awareness in Web of Science and Weibo between 1991 and 2021

The construction industry is one of the most hazardous industries, and construction hazard awareness is a major concern and vital at work. This paper compared 11,829 construction safety and health hazard awareness Weibo microposts and 769 articles indexed in Web of Science (WoS) from 1900 to 2021. It compared different foci between academia and laypeople by studying safety hazards like fire, electrical, chemical, collapsing trenches, and health-related risks such as asbestos and heat stress. The first construction safety and health hazard paper was published in 1991 in WoS, while the first construction hazard awareness related Weibo microposts appeared in 2011. Safety Science is the journal that publishes most articles in this area, and the US is the most productive country. On the other hand, the top 5 Weibo microbloggers were government departments. Popular construction safety and health hazard Weibo topics included collapse, earthquake, safety management, risk management, high-level and construction situation etc. In contrast, 20% of researchers' most popular topics in construction hazard awareness were hazard identification, recognition, computer vision, virtual reality, tracking, simulation. The results showed that academia focused on high-tech stuff, such as artificial intelligence. However, in sharp contrast, it was seldom mentioned with construction safety and health hazard awareness in Weibo despite artificial intelligence having already become part of our daily lives.

Automated summary

This paper compares the focus of construction hazard awareness between academia and laypeople by analyzing Weibo microblogs and scholarly articles. It finds that academia focuses more on high-tech topics, while there is limited mention of construction safety and health hazard awareness in Weibo.