Geosciences (Nov 2020)
The Scientific Landscape of November 23rd, 1980 Irpinia-Basilicata Earthquake: Taking Stock of (Almost) 40 Years of Studies
Abstract
The November 23rd, 1980 Irpinia-Basilicata (Southern Italy) earthquake is one of the strongest earthquakes ever occurred in Italy. The earthquake was a natural laboratory for the scientific community, which was engaged highly and promptly in investigating the event, thus publishing a flood of papers in different research areas over time. Just these research outputs are the focus of the article, which examines, with a tailored methodological approach, the international and national (Italian) studies started and advanced since the occurrence of the earthquake. First, we built and analyzed statistically two bibliographic databanks regarding the earthquake studies: (a) the international version of IRpinia Bibliographic databASE (IR_BASE_ENG), selecting and standardizing the pertinent scientific documents extracted from Scopus, Web of Science, and other databases and (b) the national version of the database (IR_BASE_IT) using the Google Scholar search engine to search for the most relevant papers in Italian. Second, IR_BASE_ENG was analyzed in a bibliometric perspective through the data mining VOSviewer software (Waltman et al., 2010) that builds co-occurrence term maps useful in perspective of investigating the wide-ranging studies on the earthquake. Third, taking a cue from this network analysis, we recognized the main research topics and performed a minireview of the related international studies, integrating in it a quick reference to the literature in Italian. Finally, we associated the scientific outputs to each cluster/topic, also performing the frequency analysis of the published documents for each subject, thus gaining information on the temporal trends of studies and getting a more exhaustive evidence of the scientific landscape on the earthquake over the last 40 years.
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