Replication Data for: Connecting Social Capital and Vulnerability: A Citation Network Analysis of Disaster Studies

This study contains replication data for this study. A growing field of disaster scholarship uses qualitative and quantitative methods to illuminate the role of social capital and social networks in recovery and resilience outcomes. But this approach seems disconnected from older approaches based on broader themes such as vulnerability. Which school of thought is more prominent in disaster social science, and to what degree are these fields interconnected? To assess this, this study uses network analysis to visualize citation patterns, schools of thought, and influential authors from 912 articles on disasters. Our analysis finds that while all clusters of disaster research deal with some kind of vulnerability - such as age, poverty, race, and gender - only one of six main research clusters engages scholarship on social capital. Despite these lacunae, the most influential works in the field point to strong synergies between social capital and vulnerability research. This work highlights that social capital can help us better understand how vulnerable populations can organize to mitigate disaster outcomes, and that the insights of vulnerability scholars on race and gender can improve social capital scholars’ understanding of bridging and bonding social ties in disaster recovery.