In order to have an overall understanding of the development of CSSJ in the past 30 years, 8 894 papers were collected from the Chinese Citations Database (owned by CNKI), and the data was cleaned and processed by using Bibliographic Analysis Tool(BAT) software. Bibliometrics approach was adopted to analyze publish and download trends, overall impact distribution, major provincial regions, leading institutions and authors, hot topics and research methods, and highly cited papers of CSSJ. The results show that CSSJ has an increase trends in both outputs of publications and download frequencies since 1991. Distribution of impact factors, cited frequencies and h-index demonstrates the high influence of CSSJ in the safety area. Moreover, highly productive regions of safety science have been formed, represented by provincial regions such as Beijing, Jiangsu and Hunan etc., and representative high-yield institutions include Beijing Jiaotong University, Liaoning Technical University and Central South University. The number of authors also become larger and larger along with the development of CSSJ, and co-authored papers have become the major type. WU Chao, FU Gui and CHEN Guohua etc. have ranked among the most productive authors in the journal in the past 30 years. And during its development, it has formed six topic groups, including safety and emergency management, safety engineering simulation and experiment, safety and risk evaluation, traffic safety, safety behavior and culture as well as safety prediction. In the research methods aspect, numerical simulation, analytic hierarchy process, neural network and structural equation model are the widely used in CSSJ papers.
