# A Review of Seatbelt Technologies and Their Role in Vehicle Safety
## 2 Materials and Methods
### Screening, Data Extraction, and Bibliometric Tools  
Pre-processing of the set of articles and removal of any duplicates was carried out using the ScientoPy v1.4.0 tool [9], which has a high efficiency in removing duplicates and redundancy. Following this process, 1205 unique articles were retained. ScientoPy was employed as a bibliometric analysis tool to support both data cleaning and exploratory analysis processes. Specifically, it contributed to the removal of duplicate records by allowing for the systematic identification and exclusion of redundant entries based on metadata comparisons such as titles, authors, and publication years. Furthermore, ScientoPy facilitated keyword analysis by extracting, aggregating, and visualizing the most frequently occurring author keywords and indexed terms across the dataset. This enabled the identification of prevailing research themes, trends over time, and potential gaps in the literature, thereby improving the thematic structuring and analytical depth of the review. Following the author's keywords, most papers had as main keywords the following: seatbelt, followed by road safety and limiter. It can be observed in Figure 3 that most of the authors used in their papers variations of the word \"seatbelt\" as main keyword. The related fields in Table 1 were classified based on two metrics: the Average Growth Rate (AGR), which quantifies the average increase in published articles between two consecutive full years (2023 and 2024), and the Average Documents per Year (ADY), which represents the overall average number of articles published on topics related to the primary field of seatbelt technology. Figure 3: Trending for the top 10 author keywords with the total number of articles considered. Table 1 presents the top author keywords related to seatbelt research, along with their total frequency, AGR, and ADY. The keywords \"seatbelt\" and \"seatbells\" rank first and second, with total occurrences of 206 and 165, respectively, and positive AGR values of 1 and 2. In contrast, the third-ranking keyword, \"seatbelt use\", shows a lower total frequency (97) and a negative AGR of \(-1.5\), despite its central relevance to occupant safety. The negative growth rate of \"seatbelt use\" may initially appear to contradict the recognized importance of seatbelt-related research. However, a closer examination suggests a shift in keyword preferences and terminological practices rather than a decline in research focus. The keywords \"seatbelt\" and \"seatbells\" show consistent or increasing usage over time, both with higher ADY values (6.5), indicating that they continue to be actively used in more recent publications. In contrast, \"seatbelt use\" has an ADY of 5.5, suggesting that it peaked earlier and may now be declining in favor of more generalized or updated terminology. This pattern implies a possible semantic convergence, where newer studies favor more concise or technically broader terms like \"seatbelt\" or pluralized variants. The term \"seatbelt use\", traditionally associated with behavioral studies or public health perspectives, may be less prevalent in recent engineering or automotive safety literature, which increasingly emphasizes system integration and technological innovation. While the initial keyword analysis provided a frequency-based overview, a thematic synthesis allows for a deeper interpretation of the prevailing research focus areas. Notably, terms such as \"seatbelt\", \"seatbells\", and \"seatbelt use\" emerge as central themes, which, in combination with \"road safety\" and \"traffic safety\", suggest a sustained emphasis on occupant protection in vehicular environments. This focus aligns with recent policy developments, such as the 2024 European Union Directive on Adaptive Restraint Systems, which mandates the integration of intelligent seatbelt technologies tailored to occupant characteristics and crash scenarios.