Exploring the emerging ICT trends in seismic hazard by scientometric analysis during 2010–2019

Earthquake is among the most disastrous natural hazards existing in the global economy. Large-scale earthquakes exhibit threats and challenges to the modern society, causing casualties and deaths, impeding socio-economic activities and causing massive economic losses throughout the world. Thus there is a need for an earthquake early warning, detection, and rescue system which can save lives of human, environment, and economy of the world. Tremendous growth in the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) applications has opened up new possibilities in characterizing infrastructure, risk area and disaster zones, planning and implementation of seismic hazard reduction measures etc. Furthermore, ICT provides an enormous opportunity for both disaster management systems and earthquake-related authorities (emergency responders, police, public health and seismology departments) to acquire state-of-the-art assistance and improved insights for precise and appropriate decision making. Consequently, it is now of paramount importance to transform from individual monitoring, prediction and decision-making frameworks to smart earthquake management systems which includes decision makers and earthquake affecting people equally with the assistance of recent technological advancements. Even though a significant number of earthquake or seismic hazard papers are published in international journals, there has been no quantitative assessment of information and communication technologies (ICT) in this literature yet encountered. Hence, this study is performed. This paper presents a bi-dimensional scientometric study of research from the perspective of various domains, research areas of seismic hazard and ICT trends over the last 10 years, as indexed in Scopus. The essence behind this study is to unveil the main influencing aspects that govern the publications and its citation structure using scientometric method. The publication pattern is analyzed first, along with related subject categories and contributing countries. Then, citation structure is analyzed which includes the distribution of citations over the years, citing journals, documents, authors and influential institutions along with their impact in terms of citations per paper. Furthermore, the keyword analysis is visualized using VOSviewer. Timeline review of keywords are exported from VOSviewer to pinpoint the hotspots and research trends. This paper provides in-depth understanding of existing seismic hazard research and indicates the emerging ICT trends in this research domain.