Abstract: In order to study academic evolution and development frontier of safety science from a perspective of influential scholars, with the renowned Safety Science as data source, highly cited authors were detected and analyzed. Based on the 4 074 articles and reviews published in Safety Science and indexed in Web of Science from 1991 to 2020, authors co-citation and knowledge map methods were applied for data analysis, and then VOSviewer software was used to analyze evolution characteristics of influential authors. The results show that REASON J, HOLLNAGEL E, HALE AR, ZOHAR D, RASMUSSEN J, DEKKER S and LEVESON N etc, rank as researchers of significant influence in safety science in the past 30 years, and these high cited authors have formed three core intellectual bases, including 'safety culture and safety climate', 'safety systems and accident modeling', and 'safety and risk management', and also three small groups, including 'safety evacuation', 'traffic safety' and 'slip and fall'. With the continuous development of safety science, structure of its intellectual base become more and more stable. During evolution process, researches on 'slip and fall' is declined, while 'safety evacuation' become an emerging hot research field.

Key words: safety science, influential scholar, authors co-citation network, intellectual base, VOSviewer