Progress and landscape of disaster science: Insights from computational analyses

This study identifies trends in disaster science research as well as knowledge gaps at a broad scale in order to help underpin and inform future research in the area. A numerical analysis of 58,106 peer-reviewed articles over four decades reveals key research themes and clusters, their temporal variation of activity as well as the influential studies that have played a key role in their development. Results indicate that what we recognize as contemporary disaster science has only shown discernible patterns of activity and knowledge foundation formation since the 1990s. Disaster research currently constitutes approximately 0.23% of all academic papers published per year. The initial and intermediate phases of the development of the field have been unsystematic and fragmented, with the focus of the field fluctuating for almost two decades until recently when research clusters have shown signs of stabilizing. It is observable that, over the last few years, more attention has been allocated to mitigation, response and recovery by focusing on issues such as the psychological impacts of disasters, reducing exposure to disasters and building community resilience to cope and recover from disasters. This is in contrast with earlier years where the focus was predominantly on preparedness and prevention. Research in different countries has been highly correlated with the types of disasters that occur in their regions, highlighting the relevance of the local situatedness and context in disaster research. The recent emergence and explosive growth of a research cluster linked to flood detection, flood mapping and flood hazard assessment is particularly notable, marking the sharpest growth of a single research cluster ever recorded in this field. A similar trend, though of a smaller magnitude, is observable in relation to research on wildfire hazard. Overall, flood-related research has proven one of the dominant themes, with multiple clusters detectable on the topic, each with their own distinguishable knowledge foundation (i.e., set of references). The pattern of collaboration among disaster researchers is shifting from predominantly domestic research towards international collaborations (currently reaching about 1/3 of all disaster-related papers each year), a sign of recognition to the value of cross-cultural and interdisciplinary perspectives in disaster research.