A review of contributions to disasters: 1977-1996

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.