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An overview of climate change vulnerability: a bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science database

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Abstract

Based on worldwide scholars’ 3,004 papers published in 658 academic journals in the Web of Science database on the topic of climate change vulnerability from 1991 to 2012, this paper quantitatively analyzes the global scientific performance and hot research areas in this field by adopting bibliometric method. The results show that (1) the vulnerability researches on climate change have experienced a rapid growth since 2006, and the publications are widely distributed in a large number of source journals, while the top two productive institutions are the University of East Anglia and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research; (2) the cooperation at author level is on the rise, and there are closer relationships in institutional and national levels; (3) the most widely focused research topics in this field include health issues in the socioeconomic system, food security in the field of agricultural system and the issue of water resource management, etc.; (4) according to the papers from the top journals, we find that the research areas for climate change vulnerability in those publications are located in the ecological diversity, ecosystem service, water resource management and electric power supply, etc.

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Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grant No. 71020107026, National Basic Research Program of China under the Grant No. 2012CB955704, and the scholarship fund from the China Scholarship Council. The authors also would like to thank Prof. Tad Murty and the anonymous referees for their suggestions and corrections on the earlier draft of this paper according to which we improved the content.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Bing Wang, Su-Yan Pan, Ruo-Yu Ke, Ke Wang & Yi-Ming Wei

  2. Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, 100081, China

    Bing Wang, Su-Yan Pan, Ruo-Yu Ke, Ke Wang & Yi-Ming Wei

  3. Department of Civil Engineering, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, K1N6N5, Canada

    Bing Wang

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  1. Bing Wang
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Correspondence to Yi-Ming Wei.

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Wang, B., Pan, SY., Ke, RY. et al. An overview of climate change vulnerability: a bibliometric analysis based on Web of Science database. Nat Hazards 74, 1649–1666 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11069-014-1260-y

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