Visualization and Bibliometric Analysis of Research Trends on Human Fatigue Assessment

This study aims to analyze the scientific research progress on human fatigue assessment (HFA) by using a bibliometric method, which was conducted a systematic analyses of 28,028 scientific papers about HFA from the Web of Science database, and the results were discussed from the following perspectives: temporal distribution, geographical distribution, discipline distribution, and key words distribution. In addition, this analysis also provides the network of author co-citation and key words. The results are summarized as follows: 1) the number of papers about HFA increased rapidly since 1990s; 2) The United States is a high-yield, high-cited country with 36.70% of the world's total literatures, and whose average citation index on HFA research is 47.89 per paper; China is the developing country with the largest number of publications, but its total citations and average citations are backward, only with an average of 21 citations per article; 3) The assessment of human fatigue shows the development trend of multidisciplinary intersecting; 4) There is a relative lack of cooperation among the world's leading scholars; the Dutch Gijs Bleijenberg is the most published scholar in the world, who have 108 articles on HFA research; the American scholar David Cella has the most influential article, with an h-index of 36; the distribution of Chinese scholars is relatively scattered, and no one has written more than five articles; 5) All of countries in the world had the same research topics, "muscle fatigue" is an important part of the HFA; China needs to pay more attention to the fatigue assessment associated with cancer. The results of the analysis can be used to enhance our understanding of HFA research and support further research in this area.