A meta-review of disaster research

Review articles are vital in synthesizing existing research, identifying knowledge gaps, and informing future research directions. In the context of disasters, reviews help uncover relationships, intricacies, and nexus among different hazard types, concepts, and thematic areas. However, existing reviews tend to adopt a segmented approach, focusing on individual disasters, with limited efforts toward comprehensive meta-reviews across multiple disaster types. This study conducted a meta-review, or review of reviews, on six major disasters: droughts, earthquakes, floods, heatwaves, hurricanes, and wildfires. A total of 26,076 review articles were retrieved from the Scopus database. Bibliometric analysis, review trend analysis, keyword mapping, and citation analysis were performed to explore the landscape of disaster-related review literature. The analysis revealed a consistent increase in published review articles, particularly on floods, droughts, and earthquakes. A total of 962 authors from 160 distinct Institutions globally contributed to the disaster reviews domain. Reviews on droughts, heatwaves, and wildfires received the highest citation counts. Most reviews were published in English and Chinese. Keyword analysis highlighted resilience and adaptation as recurrent terms across all disaster types, underscoring their central role in disaster risk reduction and vulnerability mitigation. The findings indicate a growing global interest in synthesizing disaster research through reviews, especially for specific hazards. However, the limited number of integrated meta-reviews indicates the need for more holistic approaches. The observed interconnections among different disasters suggest that a collective, cross-hazard perspective is crucial to understanding complex disaster dynamics and enhancing resilience, adaptation, and sustainability strategies.