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Abstract
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It has been exactly one year since WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in 2020 March. The pandemic has changed the lives of many as never before. We saw a range of public health measures introduced in different parts of the World to contain the SARS-CoV-2 virus and reduce its spread. In the midst of the slowing of economic activities and reduced travel, road traffic injuries are expected to be reduced. However, much like the COVID-19, its impact on road safety is also largely unknown. The research community must rise to this challenge, ask research questions, and develop new partnerships and collaborations in the coming months.
The first step to finding answers to complex issues is to ask the relevant questions. In emerging fields like road safety, often the questions are not obvious. Researchers are relying on systematic reviews and evidence gap maps (EGM) based on formal protocols (Mohan et al., 2020). In this issue we present an article by Linlin Jing et al., from China, highlighting the new areas for further research. This is an important study, which aims to examine the literature gleaned from the core of the Web of Science on road traffic injuries from 1928 to 2018. The authors have applied a bibliometric framework to road traffic injury research. The findings in this interesting study point to possibilities of future research on the subject, by applying co-word analysis of road traffic injury research over a period of ninety years. This study does admit to the limitation that it has not been able to pay attention to all road traffic injury research papers. The results from this study are a good start for identifying gaps in current research, leading to new research questions; however, combining this with a formal protocol for quality control, inclusion and exclusion criteria, would pave the way for new knowledge creation required to meet the new challenges.
Pedestrian and motorcycle crashes continue...
Language: en |