ABSTRACT In this study, a bibliometric method was used to evaluate the global scientific production of risk assessment research for the last 16 years and provide insights into the characteristics of the risk assessment research activities and tendencies that may exist in the papers. Data were obtained on the online version of SCI, Web of Science from 1992 to 2007. Two important respects of the paper characteristics were analyzed: (i) performance of publication and (ii) research tendency and hotspots. The main results were as follows: English-language articles took the majority of all the publications. Number of articles in this field increased from 1 in 1968 to 1037 in 2007. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment published the most papers in this field, taking 3% of all. Research tendency was investigated by statistically analyzing the distribution of paper title, author keyword, and keyword plus. Furthermore, a new method named "word cluster analysis" was successfully applied to find the research hotspots of this field. Research hotspots of risk assessment mainly focused on three subject categories: environmental science, ecology, and epidemiology. This new bibliometric method can help relevant researchers realize the panorama of global risk assessment research, and establish the further research direction.
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