Reducing maritime accidents in ships by tackling human error: a bibliometric review and research agenda

Abstract

Over the past decade the number of maritime transportation accidents has fallen. However, as shipping vessels continue to increase in size, one single incident, such as the oil spills from ‘super’ tankers, can have catastrophic and long-term consequences for marine ecosystems, the environment and local economies. Maritime transport accidents are complex and caused by a combination of events or processes that might ultimately result in the loss of human and marine life, and irreversible ecological, environmental and economic damage. Many studies point to direct or indirect human error as a major cause of maritime accidents, which raises many unanswered questions about the best way to prevent catastrophic human error in maritime contexts. This paper takes a first step towards addressing some of these questions by improving our understanding of upstream maritime accidents from an organisation science perspective—an area of research that is currently underdeveloped. This will provide new and relevant insights by both clarifying how ships can be described in terms of organisations and by considering them in a whole ecosystem and industry. A bibliometric review of extant literature of the causes of maritime accidents related to human error was conducted, and the findings revealed three main root causes of human and organisational error, namely, human resources and management, socio-technical Information Systems and Information Technologies, and individual/cognition-related errors. As a result of the bibliometric review, this paper identifies the gaps and limitations in the literature and proposes a research agenda to enhance our current understanding of the role of human error in maritime accidents. This research agenda proposes new organisational theory perspectives—including considering ships as organisations; types of organisations (highly reliable organisations or self-organised); complex systems and socio-technical systems theories for digitalised ships; the role of power; and developing dynamic safety capabilities for learning ships. By adopting different theoretical perspectives and adapting research methods from social and human sciences, scholars can advance human error in maritime transportation, which can ultimately contribute to addressing human errors and improving maritime transport safety for the wider benefit of the environment and societies ecologies and economies.

A holistic view of maritime navigation accidents and risk indicators: examining IMO reports from 2011 to 2021

“…Indeed, most studies use HE as a catch-all term but do not offer further precision (Zhang et al 2019b ). Scholars agree that the terms ‘human error’ and ‘human factors’ are generally ill-defined, with little distinction between them and are often used interchangeably (Dominguez-Péry et al 2021a ). Arguably, identifying the causes of accidents is largely dependent on the discipline and the perspective of the entities evaluating them (Dominguez-Péry et al 2021a ).…”

“…Scholars agree that the terms ‘human error’ and ‘human factors’ are generally ill-defined, with little distinction between them and are often used interchangeably (Dominguez-Péry et al 2021a ). Arguably, identifying the causes of accidents is largely dependent on the discipline and the perspective of the entities evaluating them (Dominguez-Péry et al 2021a ). For instance, from the engineering perspective, HE is considered a variable that must be tackled to avoid accidents.…”

The Conditional Probability for Human Error Caused by Fatigue, Stress and Anxiety in Seafaring

“…The possibility of forecasting human errors in the marine environment has been studied as well [8,[10][11][12][13]. A number of studies indicate direct or indirect human errors as a major cause of maritime accidents, which raises many unanswered questions about the best ways of preventing catastrophic human errors in the maritime context [14].…”

The Bibliometric Analysis and Visualization Mapping of Research on Maritime Accidents

“…Utilizing bibliometric analysis, Mao et al (2010) have analyzed the global scientific output of risk assessment research over the previous sixteen years and provided insight into the study's characteristics and trends. Lau et al (2017) Although significant bibliometric analysis studies have been conducted in diverse fields, there are few bibliometric analyses focused on marine accidents (Kulkarni et al, 2020;Gil et al, 2020;Dominguez-Péry et al, 2021;Fu et al, 2021;Wróbel, 2021). A bibliometric study of risk management studies with a focus on the Baltic Sea region has been presented by Kulkarni et al (2020).…”