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A review of emergency response in disasters: present and future perspectives

• Review Article
• Published: 10 September 2020
• Volume 105 , pages 1109–1138, ( 2021 )

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• Yi Feng 1 &
• Shaoze Cui   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9635-0181 2  

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With the increasing occurrence of disasters, how to respond to disasters has attracted a lot of interest. However, a systematic study of emergency response in disasters (ER) has been ignored. Based on the bibliometric analysis and visualization of 3678 journal articles (1970–2019) related to ER from the Web of Science, the current research situation in the field of ER has been studied. The important research questions and trends in the field of ER have been identified. In this study, the VOSviewer software is used to visually analyze publications about ER. Specifically, the most influential journals and authors, highly cited publications, authoritative research institutions, and co-citation are identified in this study. Moreover, the Ucinet software is applied to analyze the social network of 45 high-frequency keywords and the Citespace software is used to study the keyword citation bursts. The results show that the keywords “optimization” and “demand” are the most popular research interests. Besides, four main research topics on ER are summarized, which are emergency supplies and facility-related research, emergency preparedness and security-related research, emergency decision system-related research, and emergency medical rescue and cure-related research. Finally, this study puts forward the research work that should be paid attention to in the future according to different research topics, which can help researchers to understand the ER research progress systematically and focus on emerging research questions.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is our original work and has not been published or has it been submitted simultaneously elsewhere. All authors have agreed to the submission and declared that they have no conflict of interest. This paper was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 71533001, 71974025), Humanities and Social Science Youth Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (Grant No. 17YJC630014), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No.2020M670761).

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Feng, Y., Cui, S. A review of emergency response in disasters: present and future perspectives. Nat Hazards 105 , 1109–1138 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04297-x

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Received : 04 April 2020

Accepted : 02 September 2020

Published : 10 September 2020

Issue Date : January 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-020-04297-x

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