Pedestrian evacuation in fire environments: Scientometric analysis and systematic evaluation

Understanding pedestrian evacuation behaviors in fire is critical to mitigate human casualties in emergencies. Benefiting from the rapid progress in fire safety engineering and computer simulation technologies, research on pedestrian evacuation in fire environments has attracted increasing attention from the academic community. To have a comprehensive understanding on the hotspots and development trends in this field, in this study a total of 673 relevant literatures from 2000 to 2024 have been collected from the database Web of Science and Scopus. The keywords co-occurrence network, authors' collaborative network, journal productivity, regional cooperation and research themes are analyzed. The results show that the amount of literature related to fire evacuation exhibit an exponential increase on the whole since 2015. The most productive journal is Physica A-statistical Mechanics and Its Applications, with 76 published articles, accounting for 11.3 % of the total research publications. The topic analysis shows that the research hotspots focus on the movement behavior and characteristics of the crowd in the fire environment, the simulation and optimization of the evacuation process, and the individual's risk perception and decision-making behavior. Further, the study identifies the key challenges for improving pedestrian emergency evacuation capabilities and suggests possible research directions.