Research status, challenges and trends of curve driving safety: A bibliometric analysis and critical review

Curve driving safety is a significant and complex aspect of road traffic safety, posing obstacles to the overall improvement of transportation safety. To comprehensively summarize the research progress in this research field, a systematic search was conducted in the Web of Science Core Collection database, retrieving 1922 scholarly publications on curve driving safety research published between 2000 and 2022. Utilizing the VOSviewer software, a visualization display was generated to provide an overview of the current research status, analysis of challenges and issues, and identification of future research trends. The findings reveal a consistent increase in annual publications on curve driving safety research. The country, institution and journal that make the most contributions to the research field are the United States, Chang'an University and “Transportation Research Record” respectively. The current research hotspots of curve driving safety focus on the risk and influence factors of curve driving crashes, curve driving behavior and driver performance, dynamic stability analysis of curve driving vehicles, curve driving safety guarantee technology and improvement strategy. The research of curve driving safety involves many theoretical framework, technical methods and model methods. Moving forward, future research should emphasize the development of a comprehensive spectrum of adverse curve driving behavior considering spatiotemporal factors encompassing the “driver-vehicle-road-environment” paradigm. Additionally, it is crucial to establish evaluation indicators and mapping standards for identifying curve driving safety states under the influence of multiple factors, while exploring the potential of machine learning and connected vehicle technologies to implement curve driving risk perception models and technological advancements. • A bibliometric analysis on the curve driving safety research field was conducted. • Literature publication, literature co-citation, and keyword co-occurrence analysis were used. • The main research contents and research methods in the research field of curve driving safety were analyzed. • The existing problems and development trends in the research field of curve driving safety were summarized.