Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2025

DOI

10.1515/jhsem-2023-0067

Publication Title

Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management

Volume

Article in Press

Pages

1-20

Abstract

Effective risk and crisis communication can improve health and safety and reduce harmful effects of hazards and disasters. A robust body of literature investigates mechanisms for improving risk and crisis communication. While effective risk and crisis communication strategies are equally desired across different hazard types (e.g., natural hazards, cyber security), the extent to which risk and crisis communication experts utilize the “lessons learned” from scientific domains outside their own is suspect. Therefore, we hypothesized that risk and crisis communication research is siloed according to academic disciplines at the detriment to the advancement of the field of risk communications research writ large. We tested this hypothesis by evaluating the disciplinarity of 5,078 published articles containing risk and crisis communication keywords using a combination of simple descriptive statistics, natural language processing, and hierarchical clustering. Finding that the risk communication research is siloed according to disciplinary lexicons, we present our findings as a call for convergence amongst our risk and crisis communication scholars to bridge across our silos. In so doing, we will increase our ability to affect transformative change in the efficacy of our risk and crises messages across myriad hazard types – from cyclones to cybersecurity.

Rights

© 2025 The Authors.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License.

Original Publication Citation

Reinhold, A. M., Gore, R. J., Ezell, B., Izurieta, C. I., & Shanahan, E. A. (2025). From cyclones to cybersecurity: A call for convergence in risk and crisis communications research. Journal of Homeland Security & Emergency Management. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsem-2023-0067

ORCID

0000-0003-4065-6146 (Gore), 0000-0003-4274-908X (Ezell)

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