Research in the Field of Natural Hazards Based on Bibliometric Analysis

Natural hazards are highly threatening to human survival and development. Over the last 4 decades, research on natural hazards has become increasingly advanced and in-depth. With the continued development of science and technology and the complex changes in the environment, reviewing research fields and exploring current research hot spots and trends have become a key issue. In this study, 25,969 publications from the Web of Science were selected and statistically analyzed using bibliometrics to extract information on authors, institutions, countries/regions, journals, disciplines, keywords, and abstracts. Research hot spots were identified by machine learning. The results showed that (1) the number and growth rate of publications related to natural hazards are continuously increasing; (2) the author Biswajeet Pradhan, the institution of Chinese Academy of Sciences, the country of US, and the journal Natural Hazards are the most prolific in each aspect, respectively, and Geosciences Multidisciplinary is the most important subject; (3) keyword analysis showed that earthquakes, landslides, and floods are the core of natural hazards research, and climate change, disaster prevention and mitigation, and emergency management have received more and more attention in recent years; and (4) among the topics obtained from latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) models, the most frequent topics are Mechanism and simulation and Risk Assessment, and Drought and water hazards and Machine learning are developing rapidly.

Automated summary

Natural hazards pose significant threats to human survival and development. Advances in research on natural hazards have occurred over the past 4 decades. With the continuous development of science and technology and the changing environment, it is important to review research fields and explore current hotspots and trends.