Citation

Haghani M, Behnood A, Dixit V, Oviedo-Trespalacios O. Safety Sci. 2022; 146: e105513.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2022, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.ssci.2021.105513

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Road users in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are overrepresented in road trauma statistics. Despite the relative success of many high-income countries (HICs) in reducing deaths on their roads, not much tangible progress has been made in LMICs. Also, on the research front, the vast majority of road safety knowledge has been emerging from institutes of HICs. Considering significant differences in driving culture, legislation, and traffic law enforcement between LMICs and HICs, it seems essential that research on road safety within LMICs intensifies beyond the existing rate to produce the much-needed local knowledge and to develop initiatives that meet their safety needs and upgrade their practices. To facilitate this, here, the landscape and temporal trends of road safety research in LMICs are analysed while contrasting them with those of the general scholarly literature on road safety. It is estimated that slightly less than 10% of the road safety research has been undertaken in the contexts of LMICs, which is extremely disproportionate considering the fact that most road traffic deaths and injuries occur in LMICs. Questionnaire-based research on socio-psychological aspects of driving, cycling, and walking as well as statistical modelling of road crash data seem to have made up the dominant focus of LMIC researchers within the recent years. Areas of road safety research that are underrepresented in LMIC studies are also identified in this work. Patterns of authorship and co-authorship in LMIC studies are also analysed at the level of countries, organisations, and authors. It is hoped that this effort can contribute to further invigoration of road safety research in LMICs and to highlighting the current knowledge gaps, while also giving better recognition to active road safety researchers of LMICs, and thereby, prompting more international collaborations in this domain.

Language: en

Keywords

Low- and middle-income countries; Road crashes; Road safety; Road trauma; Traffic safety