Development and future directions of the disaster awareness research in China：An integrated identification coupling scientometric method and literature content analysis

Raising people’s disaster awareness is a prerequisite for motivating their behavior and strengthening their disaster-coping capacities. “Disaster awareness” has long been a very commonly used term in both academic community and ordinary people’s daily life. However, scientific discussion and exploration on it still remains far from sufficient so far. Using an integrated approach combined CiteSpace’s scientometric method and literature content analysis, this paper therefore aims to diagnose in particular the current status and future trends of the research of public awareness of disaster （PAD） in China that are evidenced by the relevant literature collected in CNKI from 1990—2019. The results reveal that: ① The PAD research has received an ever-increasing attention in China in the past three decades, involving a broad spectrum of disciplines and featured greatly by the multidisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary. However, the total publications and academic concerns on it are considerably less, and even much less than those on other disaster-focused topics （esp. those on disaster risk）. ② Chinese existing PAD researches can be largely identified as the following five major aspects: PAD survey and measurement, PAD promotion pathways in formal education field, PAD encouragement strategies through science-popularization, PAD & bottom-up level of disaster reduction practices, and PAD & top-down direction of disaster reduction policies. Generally, large room for improvement exists on all these five aspects. In a view of specific hazard types addressed, earthquake and meteorological hazards have relatively been placed a concentrated position. ③ The overall trends or future directions are as follows: ① Specific research contents on PAD get more and more refined, associated exploration depths become deeper and deeper, and the situation of “all flowers bloom together” clearly develops; ② The connection between academic research and practical disaster reduction requirement grows tighter and tighter, especially so does the connection between research and bottom-up level requirement; ③ Disaster reduction-focused formal education and science-popularization, and meteorological disasters under changing climates are exactly the current hotspots. Based on these findings, we finally offered some suggestions, hoping to facilitate PAD research in China and beyond.