Scientometric Analysis of Natural Disaster Management Research

Abstract

Recent decades have witnessed the frequent occurrence of natural disasters and their destructive impacts, which have disrupted the social–economic balance and caused large-scale casualties in communities all over the world. This dramatic surge in natural disaster–related events has also impacted programs and research on disaster management in different countries around the world. Especially, recent years (2009–2019) have attracted huge scholarly attention in the natural disaster management (NDM) research domain, and subsequently, extensive research document production and high rate of received citations. These global trends have tended to examine the macrostructure of the evolution in the domain of NDM research, so global research patterns could be analyzed for grasping future research directive and improving research quality. Henceforth, this paper analyzes 4,912 natural disaster management–related research documents in Scopus, published during the period of 2009–2019 in a scientometric framework. This paper analyses the domain knowledge from the perspective of various disaster management subdomains and related research areas. First, the paper analyzes the publication distributions and citation patterns using various numerical indices, namely, publication numbers, productivity score, citations count, and normalized citation impact index (NCII) for descriptive statistical analyses (i.e., research growth progression, geographic distribution, subject-area distribution, author productivity, research following, journals’ influence, core literature, and authors’ influence). Second, the paper analyzes publication distribution, citation patterns, and keywords using network-based statistical approaches such as coauthorship networks for research collaborations, cocitation networks for intellectual landscaping, and co-occurrence networks for research frontiers. The presented study efficiently investigates the diversified perspectives of the NDM domain, and provides a multifacet avenue for roadmaps in the domain.