Knowledge map of environmental crisis management based on keywords network and co-word analysis, 2005–2018

Currently, the whole world is facing various environmental crises, which have caused serious harm to human society. Environmental crisis management is extremely important in tackling environmental crises. A large number of scholars have conducted extensive research on environmental crisis management, but the knowledge map about the environmental crisis management research is unknown. Therefore, analyzing the spatial structure of environmental crisis management not only helps to understand the specific distribution of the research paradigm of environmental crisis management but is also helpful in understanding the important topics. Based on the Web of Science (WOS) database. The software of NoteExpress, Bibexcel, and Ucinet and the analysis methods of social network (SN), K-core, co-word analysis, and multi-dimensional scaling (MDS) were employed to explore the spatial structure of keywords in environmental crisis management literature. The study revealed that climate change is the hotspot of environmental crisis management. Moreover, the five main research topics on environmental crisis management have been identified, which are, respectively, different types of environmental crisis, the impact areas of the environmental crisis, the governance of environmental crisis, the application of technology in environmental crisis management, the characteristics of environmental crisis, and micro-governance. The spatial structure in the research field of environmental crisis management can be divided into application of environmental crisis management technology, management practice of environmental crisis, specific types of environmental crisis, and management theory of environmental crisis management. Finally, this study puts forward four research topics which should be attached importantly in the future.