Historical development, current landscape and emerging trends of academic journals in human factors and ergonomics: Using a bibliometric analysis and a knowledge-domain mapping analysis

Human factors and ergonomics (HFE) is vital for optimising human-centred system design. This study aimed to synthesise research on HFE and examine its historical evolution, current landscape and emerging trends. A bibliometric analysis and a knowledge-domain mapping analysis were conducted to combine perspectives on journal development and article output. This study focused on 24 journals classified in the ergonomics category in the Journal Citation Reports of 2024. Critical information for the 24 HFE journals was investigated, including commencement year of publication, composition of editorial boards, number of published papers, publishing models, 2024 quartile rankings and impact factors and 5-year impact factors. Two visualisation tools, VOSviewer and CiteSpace, were used to perform the bibliometric analysis of the 26,026 HFE documents in the Web of Science Core Collection, spanning 2010 to 2024. Results showed that HFE literature has evolved from classical industrial origins to modern technological paradigms. Increased collaborations across different research areas to address HFE problems were observed. The review also identified key domain expansions across high-impact emerging HFE frontiers, including artificial intelligence, extended reality, autonomous vehicles and wearable technologies. Building upon these findings, the study may provide in-depth insights into the critical future HFE research directions.