A Bibliometric Analysis of Disaster Management in Libraries: Focusing Google Scholar Articles Published from 2018 to 2022

Abstract

Any incident that threatens the library’s resources, collection, equipment, systems, or people is considered a disaster. According to the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), disaster management can be used to successfully manage risks by reducing their influence. The main objective of this study was to identify the natural, man-made and hybrid disasters that the libraries experienced globally from 2018 to 2022. Other objectives were to analyze the content of the papers using the most relevant keywords, to examine the yearly distribution of papers; to study the pattern of authorship of the documents; to study the number of citations received by the published papers; and to examine which countries produced the largest number publications on disaster management in libraries. There search was conducted using articles published in the 2018–2022 period. The research data was obtained Publish or Perish software program through the Google Scholar database and Google Scholar advanced search tool. 985 articles were foundof which 129 library-related disaster incidents and a review of library-related disaster literature were selected for data analysis. The keywords were used to select the most related articles anywhere in the article. VOSviewer software and Excel package was used to analyze and visualize data in the study. The results show that the most prevalent type of disasters faced by libraries were natural disasters. Floods 75 (24%), fire 57 (17%), earthquakes 42 (13%), hurricane 28 (9%), water through leaking 18 (6%), storms 11 (3%), infestations of mold or pests 11 (3%), tsunami 10 (3%), severe weather conditions 10 (3%), cyclones 10 (3%), tornado 8 (2%), volcano 8 (3%), thunder 8 (2%) and others 32 (10%).The most relevant term was library. Natural disasters occurred at a maximum rate during the last five years. The study recommends a scientific approach to disaster management in libraries utilizing relevant datasets and bibliometric tools