Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Beth Barnes, Dr Sarah Dunn, Professor Sean Wilkinson
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
Disasters affect millions of people annually, causing large numbers of fatalities, detrimental economic impact and the displacement of communities. Policy-makers, researchers and industry professionals are regularly faced with these consequences and therefore require tools to assess the potential impacts and provide sustainable solutions, often with only very limited information. This paper focuses on the themes of “disaster management”, “natural hazards” and “simulation”, aiming to identify current research trends using bibliometric analysis. This analysis technique combines quantitative and statistical methods to identify these trends, assess quality and measure development. The study has concluded that natural hazards (73%) are more predominant in research than man-made hazards (14%). Of the man-made hazards covered, terrorism is the most prevalent (83%). The most frequent disaster types are climate related, and in this study hydrological (20%), geophysical (20%), meteorological (15%) and climatological (5%) were the most frequently researched. Asia experiences the highest number of disaster events as a continent but in this study was only included in 11% of papers, with North America being the most recurrent (59%). There were some surprising omissions, such as Africa, which did not feature in a single paper. Despite the inclusion of key words “simulation” and “agent based” in the searches, the study did not demonstrate there is a large volume of research being carried out using numerical modelling techniques. Finally, research is appearing to take a reactive rather than proactive approach to disaster management planning, but the merit of this approach is questionable.
Author(s): Barnes B, Dunn S, Wilkinson S
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Natural Hazards
Year: 2019
Volume: 97
Pages: 813-840
Online publication date: 23/07/2019
Acceptance date: 17/07/2019
Date deposited: 26/07/2019
ISSN (print): 0921-030X
ISSN (electronic): 1573-0840
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
URL: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-019-03677-2
DOI: 10.1007/s11069-019-03677-2
Altmetrics provided by Altmetric
