title: A review of contributions to disasters: 1977-1996.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: 72734.2412@compuserve.com
authors.forename: C
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kelly
mesh_terms: D001319:Authorship; D015706:Bibliometrics; D004190:Disasters / Q000145:classification / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D011643:Publishing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D012106:Research