JMIR Publications

Background:

Crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC) has been proposed as a way for government and public health agencies to improve their ability to connect with the public via social media while also integrating risk communication and crisis communication. However, few studies have conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of CERC and systematically analyzed how CERC integrates with social media.

Objective:

Based on understanding what forces make essential contributions to CERC research and exploring how CERC is used in social media, we propose the current research gaps and future development paths of CERC.

Methods:

We used the Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed as databases to conduct a bibliometric analysis with "Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication" as the search term from 2005 to 2021. Then, CERC was quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. In the first part, we take the filtered 44 publications as the research object, with quantitative analysis as the core, and comprehensively covered the distribution of publications in terms of change in annual volume, journal, country, institution, author, and subject. In the second part, we use qualitative analysis to explore the composition of research topics related to keywords. The third part focuses on integrating CERC with social media based on 13 publications using social media data. Finally, we propose future research routes based on the above results.

Results:

Health Promotion Practice is the most productive journal with seven contributing publications. The USA has become the dominant player in this field, with a considerable advantage of 28 publications. Australia, China, and the UK are far behind USA's contribution, although they are the second highest contributors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is the most contributing agency with three publications. Only seven people published more than two articles at the author level, among whom Lu, J., is from China, while Reynolds, B., and the other five are all from the United States. The cluster results show that the researchers primarily focus on five categories of issues: prevention and control of infectious diseases, disaster planning of bioterrorism, social media's role in risk and crisis communication, medical intervention in risk perception, and the role of Twitter in public health crises.

Conclusions:

We raise some future concerns based on the use case of CERC in social media. First, existing research has focused too much on Twitter and may have overlooked the role of Facebook. Second, existing studies have focused on only one side of the government (agency) or the public and have not considered the effectiveness of government or agency communication strategies as assessed by public response. Third, the methodologies for studying tweets must be updated. Fourth, the research on false information in the precrisis stage must improve. Finally, the information forms of crisis communication of governments or agencies must be enriched.