Building a Journal Set to Define Human Factors Engineering for Evidence Synthesis

Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is an interdisciplinary field spanning engineering, psychology, computer science, cognitive science, ergonomics, design, and related domains, making literature identification and boundary definition challenging. Traditional database searches rely heavily on keyword strategies, yet keywords alone often fail to consistently capture disciplinary scope in fields with diffuse and overlapping terminology. Therefore, keyword-based searches may retrieve large volumes of adjacent literature while still missing core HFE work. To address this limitation, this study develops a journal set–based approach to define the HFE literature as part of an ongoing scoping review examining evidence synthesis (e.g., systematic and scoping reviews) in HFE. This approach defines the field through its core publication venues instead of relying on keywords to operationalize its boundaries. Using established subject classification schemes and curated sources, the method offers a transparent, systematic, and reproducible way to define disciplinary boundaries, and improves the precision and consistency of literature retrieval in HFE.