1. IntroductionConstruction projects are increasingly emerging as difficult and complex owing to high-risk activities. Consequently, construction professionals need a wide range of abilities to be capable of completing projects on schedule, within budget, and with the highest quality [1,2]. Worker activities in the construction industry are typically repetitive and physically strenuous. Performing such tasks in awkward positions can strain workers’ bodies, resulting in fatigue, injury, or in severe cases, permanent disability [3,4,5]. Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs) are the primary contributing factor to non-fatal injuries in construction, accounting for 27.5% of non-fatal construction injuries in the United States and 18% in Hong Kong [6]. Common risk factors of WMSD include repetitive motion, high-force exertion, awkward body posture, vibration, and contact force [7,8,9]. Additionally, WMSDs are linked to high employer expenses due to absenteeism, decreased productivity, higher healthcare costs, and workers’ compensation [6,10,11]. Therefore, proper management of employee safety and health is critical not only in creating a better working environment, but also for contractors’ direct and indirect accident costs.Ergonomics refers to the study of designing a safe and productive workplace, work habits, and workflows for workers in order to eliminate risk factors including sprains, strains, and cumulative trauma disorders, and to assess the risk level for tasks related to work. It analyzes people’s behavioral, psychological, and physiological capacities and restrictions [9,12]. Previous studies have used several ergonomic risk assessment tools such as the Posture Activity Tools Handling (PATH), Ovako Working posture Analysis System (OWAS), Rapid Entire Body Assessment (REBA), and the Rapid Upper Limb Assessment (RULA), and so on. These tools enabled the evaluation of the risk associated with certain activities by simulating tasks in the laboratory environment and also by onsite evaluation [13,14,15,16].In the last decade, construction workers’ safety was given more significance as more diverse emerging technologies were integrated into construction-related projects [17]. A literature review is thought to be a quick and easy way to comprehend a research area thoroughly [18]. Due to the immense use of ergonomic tools in reducing injuries among construction workers, literature related to this domain has greatly expanded, and several literature reviews on ergonomics in construction have been presented. Some studies concentrated on reviewing the prevalence of various risk factors and their association with WMSDs in construction. For instance, Kittuswamy and Buchholz [19] provided a review of the literature that studied the exposure of mobile equipment operators to two important health hazards: whole-body vibration and postural stress. Another study by Sobeih et al. [20] critically evaluated the epidemiological research relating psychosocial work variables to musculoskeletal diseases in construction workers. A definition of ergonomics and an overview of risk factors is presented in a review by Jaffar et al. [12]. Anagha and Annie [21] reviewed several ergonomic risk factors causing WMSDs in construction. A more specific review of the connection between physical and psychosocial risk factors and WMSD in different construction trades is investigated by Anwer et al. [22].The concept of ergonomics, its definitions, history, and its integration in the Malaysian construction industry are highlighted in a paper by Tharim et al. [23], although they did not overview the state-of-the-art ergonomic risk assessment practices. Currently, only a limited number of literature reviews focus on identifying existing ergonomic risk assessment methods in the construction industry. Inyang et al. [24] reviewed state-of-the-art ergonomic techniques and the occupational health and safety impact of WMSDs resulting from existing practice and legislation. Wang et al. [7] reviewed the available methods for WMSD risk assessment and highlighted their advantages and drawbacks. The data provided in their work is limited by timeliness, and computer-vision-based technologies are not explained adequately, downscaling their importance in ergonomics. Valero et al. [25] presented an in-depth review of the postural assessment methods focusing specifically on inertial measurement units (IMUs). However, it is restricted to only one specific technique of ergonomic assessment which limits its potential in broadening the knowledge domain of readers. Moreover, the existing reviews discussed are manual and the results rely on subjective judgment.

Despite the importance of occupational health and safety among construction workers, we can conclude that there is a lack of an in-depth and sophisticated review that fully explores the evolutionary trends of research in the ergonomics domain in the construction industry. To overcome and expand on the shortcomings of previous literature, this study used a scientometric analysis to grasp what research has been produced so far, as well as the advancing trends and the fundamental research gaps. This study therefore serves to enhance the risk assessment practices in the construction industry. Our study effort is to:

Determine global hot topics and research trends in the construction ergonomic risk assessment;

Summarize the state-of-the-art developments in the ergonomics domain of construction;

Analyze the academic collaboration between authors;

Recommend future research directions in the domain.

This study is believed to be significant for academic researchers and practitioners to apprehend and perceive the emerging key topics associated with ergonomic risk assessment in construction. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the bibliometric and scientometric methods used in this study. The visualization maps including co-author, co-occurring keywords, and citation analysis are discussed in Section 3. Section 4 describes the discussion, and the conclusions are provided in Section 5. 2. Materials and MethodsA range of methodologies is available in order to review the publications, out of which scientometric analysis excels at highlighting notable patterns and trends based on the author, keyword, and reference in a substantial body of literature data [26]. Therefore, a literature review based on the science mapping three-stage approach is applied in this study. The authors conducted a bibliometric analysis utilizing the Web of Science (WoS) database and a scientometric analysis using VOSviewer. The three stages include bibliometric analysis, scientometric analysis, and results and discussion. The overall methodology conducted in the review process is presented in Figure 1. 2.1. Bibliometric AnalysisThe bibliometric analysis employs a statistical analysis using descriptive and evaluative approaches to display or capture publishing characteristics and research trends [27,28]. It has been widely used in literature reviews to present general features of a scientific problem including authors, journals, institutions, and keywords, etc. [29]. The first stage of research commenced with a comprehensive literature search conducted in the WoS database to retrieve publications related to ergonomics risk assessment in the construction industry in October 2022. The retrieval period of the journal article is restricted between 2000 and 2022 to provide a summary of the research advancement over the previous 23 years.

The authors used “TS = Work-related musculoskeletal disorders” OR “Musculoskeletal disorders” OR “Ergonomic* risk assessment” OR “Ergonomic tools” OR “Awkward posture” AND “TS = Construction” (with TS = topic search) as the search statement to conduct a literature query which initially yielded 413 results. This provided all necessary bibliographic details, including the title, author, abstract, keywords, sources, and references. The research was further refined to include only articles and conference proceedings, thus resulting in 379 publications. English was the prerequisite language specified for selecting articles. Finally, manual screening was performed to exclude literature not pertaining to the topic and 330 documents were obtained, which were then used in the scientometric analysis.

2.2. Scientometric Analysis The scientometric analysis provides a quantitative examination of all aspects of scientific literature in order to detect knowledge structure, scientific contributions, research advancements, and new trends in the study domain [30]. The purpose of the scientometric analysis is to generate institutional productivity comparisons, institutional research rankings, and journal rankings assessing top research articles, and create profiles of leading authors and institutions regarding research performance [31]. Text mining and citation analysis are two components of scientometric analysis, which assist researchers in identifying systematic literature-related insights by identifying literature data that might be overlooked in a manual review [26]. Several tools are available to researchers for performing scientometric analysis such as Citespace, VOSviewer, and Gephi. The large range of visualization options in the user interface of Citespace makes it difficult to understand and takes more time to learn, whereas, in Gephi, there is no particular facility for processing bibliographic data, necessitating the use of additional software tools. VOSviewer can create powerful graphical visualization and can work with large-scale data [32]. Hence, visualization of networks and citation analysis was conducted in this study using VOSviewer. The VOSviewer is an easy-to-use tool that can be used to create maps of authors or journals based on data from co-citations or maps of keywords based on data from co-occurrences [33]. In addition to having unique text-mining features, VOSviewer provides the fundamental functionality needed for creating, visualizing, and understanding bibliometric networks [26]. VOSviewer was used in this study to visualize keyword co-occurrence analysis, country co-authorship analysis, author analysis, and journal citation analysis. The 330 publications extracted after the final screening were downloaded from WoS as a tab-delimited file which was then imported into the VOSviewer software (version: 1.6.18). Visualizations can be generated and displayed in different views in VOSviewer such as network, overlay, and density visualization. Network analysis was used in this study in which the trends and changes in the main research areas and the hot topics were identified first using the keyword co-occurrence network. Secondly, the actively participating countries/regions in this field were determined by applying country analysis. Through the co-authorship network, the research experts in the field of ergonomic risk assessment and their relationships were assessed. Citation analysis was performed to identify the most productive journals. 5. Conclusions

This paper summarizes the statistical analysis and mapping of a bibliometric review of the recent advancements in the topic of ergonomic risk assessment in the construction industry. This analysis explored the general trends on keywords most often used in publications, journals that published most articles, countries with significant contributions, and the most active authors in this field. In total, 330 articles published between 2000 and 2022 obtained from the WoS database are scientifically analyzed using the software VOSviewer. The co-occurring keyword analysis indicates that WMSDs and the construction industry are the hot spots in this research area. The co-authorship analysis enabled us to discover the most productive and cited authors. Li had the highest number of documents with 511 citations, whereas Seo had the lowest number of publications with the second highest citations of 182. Moreover, the leading countries are determined by their contribution to construction risk assessment. The. USA and China have contributed 131 and 33 documents, respectively. The publications from the USA, China, and the Netherlands received the highest citations.

Although this study provides a decent understanding of the fundamental elements, knowledge structure, and evolution trends in the risk assessment domain, there are some limitations to be addressed in the future. Firstly, we collected literature from only one database which limited the scope of data that led to insufficient coverage of 330 articles. Incorporating other databases such as Scopus can broaden the knowledge domain of research interest around the globe. This study conducted a scientometric analysis that examined only the title, keyword, and abstract, and to get a more in-depth information content analysis can be conducted in the future. Furthermore, the analysis of the networks and the overview provided can be subjective to the author’s knowledge and the results can vary depending on the parameters chosen in the visualization software. Overall, the findings of this study may benefit scholars and practitioners in identifying and evaluating emerging trends and research areas associated with the risk assessment of construction workers.