Visualized analysis of developing trends and hot topics in natural disaster research

Abstract

This study visualized and analyzed the developing trends and hot topics in natural disaster research. 19694 natural disaster-related articles (January 1900 to June 2015) are indexed in the Web of Science database. The first step in this study is using complex networks to visualize and analyze these articles. CiteSpace and Gephi were employed to generate a countries collaboration network and a disciplines collaboration network, and then attached hot topics to countries and disciplines, respectively. The results show that USA, China, and Italy are the three major contributors to natural disaster research. “Prediction model”, “social vulnerability”, and “landslide inventory map” are three hot topics in recent years. They have attracted attention not only from large countries like China but also from small countries like Panama and Turkey. Comparing two hybrid networks provides details of natural disaster research. Scientists from USA and China use image data to research earthquakes. Indonesia and Germany collaboratively study tsunamis in the Indian Ocean. However, Indonesian studies focus on modeling and simulations, while German research focuses on early warning technology. This study also introduces an activity index (AI) and an attractive index (AAI) to generate time evolution trajectories of some major countries from 2000 to 2013 and evaluate their trends and performance. Four patterns of evolution are visible during this 14-year period. China and India show steadily rising contributions and impacts, USA and England show relatively decreasing research efforts and impacts, Japan and Australia show fluctuating activities and stable attraction, and Spain and Germany show fluctuating activities and increasing impacts.

Socio-economic and Health Impacts of Floods in a Trans-Himalayan Ecosystem

“…All the study sites suffered from damage of property and possessions (100%) but the severity of damage was more prominent in Rajbagh as it is a high flood risk area. During floods, there is loss of material and non-material assets and the effects of damage to life and property are severe for several years, resulting in livelihood vulnerability [29,30]. The loss of livelihood was worst in Bemina (50%) as the residents owned many shops/business units in the vicinity which were completely damaged affecting them occupationally.…”

Tropical marine sciences: Knowledge production in a web of path dependencies

“…Analyzing publication trends on research locations, yearly outputs, country distributions, co-authorship and other forms of collaboration [21] that are able to be extracted from these data can reveal important insights about global structural drivers of scientific knowledge production [22][23][24][25]. In particular, network analysis has been instrumental in analyzing the distribution of scientific knowledge production globally at the country level [26], showing the dominance of North American and European science outputs, even on topics where much of that knowledge is extracted elsewhere such as in global health research [27], disaster research [24], and land use in agriculture [25]. Scientometric analysis also allows for examining collaboration (e.g., co-authorship) networks overtime, to see proportional changes between domestic and international collaborations as science becomes more interconnected globally [28][29][30].…”

Review article: The spatial dimension in the assessment of urban socio-economic vulnerability related to geohazards

“…The degree of vulnerability of a specific community is a human value judgement that strongly influences management decisions (McLaughlin et al, 2002). In addition, the concept of social vulnerability (SV) to environmental hazards involves demographic and socio-economic factors that affect community resilience (Zebardast, 2013), and this is considered a hot topic in current disaster research (Shen et al, 2018). The social and economic dimensions are only two dimensions of vulnerability to multiple stressors and shocks.…”