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An integrated framework for resilience research: a systematic review based on citation network analysis

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Abstract

Resilience thinking has been widely used as a tool for interdisciplinary studies in addressing disturbance and change. However, not many studies have been taken to synthesize resilience as an interdisciplinary concept being applied across different disciplines and to investigate the common issues among them. This paper explores a conceptual framework for resilience research in an interdisciplinary perspective. In doing so, we first illustrate the academic landscape for resilience research according to the citation network of publications. After that, we categorize resilience studies into ten core research domains by their inner citation relationships. And then, we propose a framework which synthesizes principles of resilience from different research fields embracing key components (behaviors, capacities, influencing factors, interventions, and system dynamics). Based on four theoretical features—conceptions, characteristics, influencing factors, and intervention strategies, we extract key points from each domain. As resilience is a creative theory for sustainability science, this study is expected to contribute to sustainability science by generalizing resilience as an interdisciplinary concept.

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Acknowledgements

A part of this research is financially supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) JY26285080. We gratefully thank editor and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions which helped improve the quality of this paper.

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  1. School of Environment and Society, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan

    Li Xu & Yuya Kajikawa

  2. Global Institute for Water Security and School of Environment and Sustainability, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

    Li Xu

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  1. Li Xu
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  2. Yuya Kajikawa
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Correspondence to Li Xu.

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Handled by Keishiro Hara, Osaka University, Japan.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Materials and methods

The cited and citing papers are assumed to be sharing the similar topics. Network that is generated by citations among publications is a suitable indicator to detect the structure of sciences and technologies, especially for interdisciplinary concepts such as sustainability (Kajikawa et al. 2007). In this paper, we shed greater light on citation analysis to build up the academic landscape for resilience research. According to some other studies (Kajikawa and Takeda 2008; Shibata et al. 2011), our analysis follows key steps of the schematic diagram depicted in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5
figure 5

Schematic diagram of citation network analysis

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Data collection

The data of this study were retrieved from the Web of Science (service provided by ISI of Thompson Reuters) in December of 2015. We retrieved papers, including their citations, published during the time period of 1933–2015 with “resilience” as the topic and indexed by core collection databases of ISI (step 1). That is, the papers in Science Citation Index Expended (SCI-E), Social Science Citation Index (SSCI), and Conference Proceedings Citation Index-Science (CPCI-S).

In total, 33,229 papers were found and 482,583 citations were calculated. It should be noted that we did not apply any rules to clean the data but embraced all the papers that were retrieved from the databases for our analysis. This is because we are interested in identifying the mainstream research in resilience as a term or concept in the academia. We focused on the maximum connected component and excluded papers which do not have citation with the component. The component was then converted into undirected network and clustered, based on which the overall structure of resilience research was generated (steps 2–4). This process will be further explained in the following discussion.

Citation network analysis

Citation network was constructed by the collected bibliographic records (step 2) and direct citation can be the best way for the detection of scientific development (Shibata et al. 2009). Accordingly, we applied direct citations to the retrieved 33,229 papers for their citation networks. All papers were connected with unweighted edges while those papers which do not have any citations from or to other papers in the dataset were eliminated from the network (step 3). Even though the excluded papers have their contributions, it is assumed that they are digressive from the main focus of our study and are insignificantly indicative of the topical distributions of resilience research.

After that, the generated network was clustered in the topological manner according to the modularity maximization algorithm (Newman and Girvan 2004; Newman 2006). The clustering algorithm is based on a premise that a paper rarely cites another which is irrelative to its topic. Such algorithm is able to detect the structure of networks as it well measures the strength of a network into clusters. The maximized modularity means that the network can be viewed as suitably divided when the connections (links) among nodes are maximized within clusters while are minimized across different clusters (step 4). After the clustering process, the network was visualized on the basis of a large graph layout technique (Adai et al. 2004). The papers that cited each other are closely clustered in same colors in the layout, which indicates that they are sharing the similar topics or have intrinsic interrelation. And then, each cluster was named by the research fields of papers according to their titles, keywords, abstracts, and journals in which they were published.

Integration of frameworks

In citation network analysis, we focused on common concepts of resilience research among different disciplines by direct citation relations. After that, we devoted attention to the inner structure of resilience by qualitative and heuristic reviews in the rest parts of the paper. The individual frameworks in diverse research fields can be integrated and be composed of the knowledge base of the general framework. According to the illumination of core domains, we developed an integrated framework for resilience research. In developing the framework, we synthesized features of resilience from different research fields including definitions, characteristics, influencing factors and dynamics, and interventions.

Appendix 2: Classification of resilience research

The total of 19,459 papers were selected as nodes (58.6% of the retrieved papers) and 86,028 citations were extracted to generate the component of the citation network. After the clustering process, we treated the top 10 clusters as key domains of resilience research, containing a total number of 17,909 papers (92% of the component). The network was categorized into 212 clusters by the modularity maximization algorithm. However, most of the clusters contain relatively small proportion of papers. As shown in Fig. 6, the number greatly declines from 120 in cluster 10–77 in cluster 11. We therefore treated the top 10 clusters as key domains of resilience research, containing a total number of 17,909 papers (92% of the component).

Fig. 6
figure 6

Number of papers in each cluster

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Then, we analyzed contents of key domains and named each cluster by its main research focus. The process is explained by taking cluster 1 as an example. Baggio et al. (2015) found that social science has closer connections to psychology than any other research domains in terms of citation relations. Our study demonstrated the same circumstance. The citation networks generated by these two areas dominate the whole network as the largest cluster. To name the cluster, we read titles, keywords, abstracts, authors’ affiliations and publishers of the top 200 papers within cluster 1 and compared with the research area defined by ISI. According to the classification of ISI, psychological and social studies account for approximately 60 and 40% in cluster 1, respectively. One hundred and forty-six out of the top 200 papers (73%) in cluster 1 discuss resilience from pure psychological perspectives, while the rest 26% papers are from social or psychosocial point of views. The further investigation on 50 most cited papers found that relatively high citations occurred between psychology and social sciences because the studied issues relate both psychological and social aspects in many cases. For example, the studies on family resilience address not only personal mental responses of family members to external adversities but also family functions such as social support to bounce back from hard conditions (Patterson 2002; Black and Lobo 2008). Accordingly, we named the first cluster as “Psychology and social science”.

By the same token, the rest of nine clusters were given names as listed in Table 1 in the context of the paper, namely social–ecological systems and management (#2) which addresses human-nature and sustainability issues; ecological and environmental sciences (#3); business systems and engineering (#4); telecommunication systems (#5); psychiatry and brain science (#6); water systems engineering (#7); livestock and animal health (#8); marine science and fishery (#9), and biological and material science (#10).

Classifications of the first four clusters are large, in which diverse research fields overlap with one another for some certain topics. In other words, resilience as a boundary concept is widely shared by different research fields in these domains. In order to observe the inner structure in large clusters, we conducted recursive clustering for these four clusters to generate their sub-clusters. For sub-clusters, we chose the top ones which cover more than 80% papers of each cluster as the main research fields for the further analysis. For instance, the top four sub-clusters were selected in cluster #1, in which the major concerns, according to the calculation of key terms, are topics on people’s resilience to loss and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (#1-1), resilience of children and youth (#1-2), family resilience (#1-3), and occupational resilience and education (#1-4). In the same way, clusters #2, #3, and #4 were sub-clustered into a few more fields as presented in Tables 3, 4, and 5.

Table 3 Sub-clusters of cluster #1 and #2
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Table 4 Sub-clusters of cluster #3
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Table 5 Sub-clusters of cluster #4
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It is interesting that the clustering approach applied in this study grouped those papers which were typically defined as social resilience in many previous studies into social–ecological resilience and vulnerability sub-cluster (#2-1). This means that these studies are not confined only in a single research cluster. In contrast, we suppose that it highlighted and demonstrated key roles of these papers in connecting resilience across different research fields. For example, the paper conducted by Adger (2000) was viewed as the representative of social resilience (Cretney 2014; Quinlan et al. 2016). Our clustering approach grouped it into social–ecological resilience contexts, illustrating that the greater contribution of this paper and other papers in cluster #2 is to bringing social resilience concept into a combined social and ecological systems.

In order to extract key information, we explored in detail the contexts of popular papers of each cluster. The titles or keywords of these papers contain at least one of the most frequent terms (top 5) appeared in their clusters, or “resilience” frequently appears in their abstracts. As a result, the total of 332 papers were selected and reviewed. We concentrated our further reviews on four features of resilience: concepts, characteristics of resilience (the sources of resilience), factors affecting resilience, and interventions for systems’ resilience (strategies that foster resilience in different systems).

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Xu, L., Kajikawa, Y. An integrated framework for resilience research: a systematic review based on citation network analysis. Sustain Sci 13, 235–254 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-017-0487-4

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