Research Areas of Near Misses in the Construction Industry: Literature Review

Despite advances in accident prevention, the construction industry still has a high accident rate compared to other sectors. Reducing the number of accidents at work is possible by analyzing and learning from near misses. The research presented in this article aims to conduct an extensive literature review on near miss incidents in the construction industry recorded in various countries worldwide and to find a gap for further research. The primary source of knowledge used for this research was the Scopus database. The VOSviewer tool was used to classify publications based on keywords. The following sequence of keywords “construction” and “near miss” in the search field “Abstract Title, Abstract, Keywords” was used to create a database of publications. The database, containing 108 publications, was also subjected to successive manual classification. Trends in the development of each research area are presented. Many researchers emphasize that near misses are precursors to accidents at work. The conducted literature review identified an area in the space of hazardous events in the construction industry that represents a research gap that needs to be filled. The analysis of near misses, based on an understanding of their circumstances and causes, allows for the prediction of the circumstances of the cause and the potential timing of the accident. The subject of further research will be the construction of a model for predicting the occurrence of an accident based on knowledge of near misses. The novelty of the literature review conducted lies in identifying gaps in the area of near miss events in construction industry and analyzing the research tools applied in the publications.