Two Decades of Fire Engineering Research: A Bibliometric and Thematic Review, 2005-2025
Abstract
This paper presents a bibliometric and thematic review of fire engineering and fire safety science research published between 2005 and 2025. Rather than re-running a single new Scopus or Web of Science extraction, the review synthesises and cross-triangulates findings reported across a set of recently published bibliometric and scientometric studies covering structural fire engineering, fire dynamics and tunnel fires, wildland and wildland-urban-interface (WUI) fire, human behaviour and evacuation, and smart, sensor- and machine-learning-enabled fire safety, and combines this synthesis with illustrative visualisations of the field's growth, geographic distribution, leading venues and thematic structure. The reviewed literature indicates that fire engineering has grown from a comparatively narrow, code-oriented discipline in the mid-2000s into a broad, multidisciplinary research field spanning materials science, computational fluid dynamics, structural engineering, human factors, data science and artificial intelligence. Output has accelerated markedly since approximately 2015, with China and the United States as the two largest national contributors, Fire Safety Journal and Fire Technology as the most established discipline-specific venues, and keyword-cluster analyses consistently identifying five recurring thematic pillars: (1) structural fire engineering and fire-resistant materials, (2) fire dynamics and computational (CFD) modelling, (3) tunnel, underground and industrial fire safety, (4) wildland and WUI fire, and (5) smart, IoT- and machine-learning-enabled fire detection, risk assessment and evacuation. The review discusses drivers of this growth, including high-profile fire disasters, mass-timber construction and the diffusion of data-driven methods, and identifies persistent gaps around geographic concentration of research, inconsistent bibliometric methodology, and the translation of laboratory-scale findings into design practice.