The Citation Gap: An overview of academic output in the field of Natural Hazards and Climate Extremes analysed through Google Scholar data

There has been a significant increase in both the number of publications and number of citations in the last decade partly fueled by the increased exposure to research papers and such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, ResearchGate, etc. The large data set of scientific literature and respective authors in these platforms can be utilized to get a broad overview of academic discourse. This project aims to investigate the state of academia in the field of Natural Hazards and Climate Extremes using Google Scholar data. A comprehensive set of relevant tags (such as earthquake, volcano, natural hazards, climate extremes etc.) were used to filter the researchers. Additionally, a threshold of 500 citations or more was applied to focus on the most influential academics in this field. We limited the analysis to the period 1990-2023 and subsequently stratified the obtained results by gender (as perceived by the authors) and country of affiliation of the researchers. Data for number of publications was also collected for each of the researchers.

Among 2612 researchers identified, 77.2% are male, 22.6% female, and 0.2% could not be categorized into male or female. Male researchers, on average, received a larger median number of citations compared to women even though the gender citation gap in percentage has been decreasing over the last decade. Notably, regression analysis showed that, there is limited difference in number of citations per publication between the two genders. The data also shows that 78.5% of citations are attributed to researchers in high-income countries, 14.4% for those in middle-income countries, and 7.1% for those in low-income countries despite researchers in low- and middle-income countries publishing more papers per year, on average, than their counter parts in high-income countries. The researchers from high-income countries also get larger number of citations per author, on average, even when controlling for number of publications. However, the citation gap between high-income and low- and middle-income countries has narrowed in recent years. Interestingly, the observed citation gap between researchers is more pronounced due to income group than gender. In conclusion, even though disasters affect poor countries and women disproportionately, the fact that the field of natural hazards and climate extremes is largely high-income country and male-dominated raises fundamental questions on teh epistemology and legitimacy of the scientific knowledge that has been generated.