Community Resilience Planning: What New Methods Reveal About the Formation and Transformation of a Field

Community resilience planning (CRP) research encompasses diverse disciplinary foci, ranging from ecological and sociopolitical to engineering studies, and employs a range of analytic scales and methodologies. Despite the rise of integrative approaches to studying increasingly complex risks faced by communities—in particular, the growing, and often inequitable, impacts of climate and weather stressors and extremes—CRP remains a fragmented field of study and practice. This paper provides a broad map of the CRP field over the last 25 years, linking bibliometric methods with novel, network-based, multilevel approaches to computational text analysis. Despite trends toward interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research, our analysis demonstrates that the CRP field consists of divergent bodies of research, characteristic of disciplinary siloing. At the same time, new approaches to computational text analysis provide innovative ways to understand the epistemic and social links across subfields, revealing patterns of connectivity that traditional citation-based bibliometric methods cannot access. Results indicate that the development and maturation of CRP are characterized in part by a longitudinal transformation in research methods and by a shift in substantive questions that CRP researchers are asking. These findings suggest that thematic and credit-based structures operate in tandem to produce complex webs of interconnection across the disciplinary domains that have historically constituted the field.