Mapping knowledge structure and research trends of emergency evacuation studies

Abstract

To understand the current development and status of research on emergency evacuation, the published literature in the Web of Science core database from 2008 to 2018 were taken as the research objects, and the knowledge structure and research trends in the field of emergency evacuation were visualized and analyzed by using the scientific mapping knowledge domain. It is found that research on emergency evacuations throughout the world has a basic theoretical framework, but the various research branches have not yet formed a perfect knowledge network. The results show that China's publishing volume ranks first among countries/regions, and Tsinghua University has the largest number of publications among related institutions; traffic evacuation modeling, group behavior and crowd evacuation are the main knowledge groups for emergency evacuation research; the research fields mainly include disaster emergency management, personnel evacuation simulation and emergency traffic evacuation; and the research topic of emergency evacuation mainly evolves into three core paths, namely, “disaster - management - preparation - response – information”, “evacuation - behavior - model - cellular automaton - time – design” and “evacuation - behavior - simulation - social force model - exit choice”. Crowd evacuation and exit choice have become the frontiers of current emergency evacuation research.