Abstract: In order to know the research topics distribution, topics evolution and methods of degree dissertations of safety science and engineering discipline in China, 5 756 dissertations were collected from the CNKI databases, and keywords frequency analysis, co-occurrence analysis were applied to analyze the data. The results show that the hot topics of safety degree dissertations are numerical simulation, safety assessment, analytic hierarchy process, indicators and etc, that the keywords can be divided into four clusters, safety assessment and management, fire and explosion, gas safety and spontaneous combustion of coal, that the topics evolution of the dissertations is stable in each period, and have focused on two parts, the soft aspect in safety assessment and the hard aspect in numerical simulation, that the hot methods that used in safety dissertations are numerical simulation, analytic hierarchy process, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation and BP neural network and etc, that these methods could be clustered into three groups, including simulation, forecast and evaluation, and decision making, and that the fundamental research should be paid more attention in the future.

Key words: safety science and engineering, dissertation, co-word analysis, word frequency analysis, research method