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Katie Sykes , Research Assistant, RAND Europe
Charlie Coyte , Senior Analyst, RAND Europe
Perhaps the most striking finding is that China is by far the biggest producer and funder of engineering safety research, with the United States and South Korea a distant second and third. More than 40% of the papers analysed had first authors from China, and eight of the top 10 most active funders of engineering safety research were Chinese institutions.
China has consolidated its position in the engineering safety research landscape over the past 10 years: in our sample, the proportion of engineering safety publications authored by Chinese researchers increased from 24% in 2015 to 58% in 2025.
Our findings suggest that engineering safety researchers from China tend not to collaborate across national borders. In our sample, only 20% of engineering safety publications by researchers from China featured collaborators from outside of the country. To put this figure in perspective, 65% of UK publications had at least one non-UK author.
Our sample of publications was global in scope, allowing us to explore the makeup of different regions’ engineering safety research portfolios. We found comparisons between China, the EU, the US and the UK to be particularly revealing, suggesting differences in research priorities.
For instance, as a funder, China has a focus on safety in the mining industry. In our sample, publications on coal mine safety and underground mining formed more than 9% of China’s portfolio. The corresponding figure for the US was just over 4%, while the figures for the EU and UK were under 2%.
We also identified several engineering safety subfields in which China is less prominent and where other regions play a leading role. For example, maritime safety and collision risk accounted for more than 25% of the EU’s overall engineering safety funding portfolio, compared to around 8% for the UK, 5% for China, and 2% for the US.
More than half of the engineering safety publications in our sample were funded by government bodies, making governments by far the largest source of funding for engineering safety research worldwide. However, we found that smaller, more specialised institutions can punch above their weight as funders in subfields of engineering safety, where they sometimes fund more work than much larger organisations.
As an example, consider maritime safety, a priority area for Lloyd’s Register Foundation. While most of the global top 20 funders of maritime-related engineering safety research are large public bodies, Poland’s Gdynia Maritime University and Turkey’s Istanbul Technical University rank 12th and 14th respectively, suggesting that specialised institutions can play an important role in supporting research in specific subfields of engineering safety.
Engineering safety is a growing area of research: the number of engineering safety papers published increased by an average of 18% each year over the period of our study, far more than the 4% increase we observed for engineering overall.
However, engineering safety is not a distinct academic field. Instead, it spans a range of academic disciplines: while a majority (62%) of the papers we analysed were published in engineering journals, our sample also included articles published in journals that focus on many other disciplines, including computer science (8%) and chemistry (8%).
Taken together, these findings suggest that creating cross-disciplinary platforms to bring together engineering safety researchers, funders, users and other stakeholders could be beneficial. Such spaces would encourage connections between stakeholders from different disciplines and industries, promoting the exchange of ideas that could spur new directions in the growing field of engineering safety research.
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