A Review of Contributions to Disasters

Since the first issue in 1977, Disasters has been one of the pre‐eminent refereed journals on the study and reporting of disasters. This article reviews 703 articles and reports in the journal through 1996 to provide a snapshot of the nature of the journal throughout 20 years of publication. The results indicate the most common contributions: first, were research articles by authors from the North Atlantic; second, most often dealt with natural disaster relief or impact; and third, most frequently focused on Africa. These generalisations, however, do not reflect attention paid to food‐related and political disasters and greatly understate the broad diversity of material presented in the journal. To improve the topical and geographic coverage of Disasters probably requires a proactive effort to close gaps in the journal’s coverage of disasters

Forensic engineering · Injury prevention · Medical emergency · Occupational safety and health · Pathology · Poison control · Suicide prevention · Disaster Management and Resilience · Engineering · Human Factors and Ergonomics · Medicine