Emergency management (EM) practice has never been more important. The National Disaster and Emergency Management University was launched to serve as a center for thought leadership in the field, offer education and training, and promote research. This report describes an attempt to identify and map a body of EM research to support the university and discusses the implications of the mapping effort.

Emergency Management Research

Hard to Find, Even More Difficult to Organize

Jessica Jensen, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Vanessa Parks, Lea Sabbag, Michael Vincent Ryan, Travis Merrill

ResearchPublished Aug 25, 2026

Emergency management (EM) practice has never been more important. Disasters are occurring with growing frequency, driven by a broadening set of hazards and increasing vulnerability to them. Disasters are often compounding and cascading, and more and more people and communities are suffering. The Federal Emergency Management Agency therefore launched the National Disaster and Emergency Management University (NDEMU) to serve as a center for thought leadership in the field, offer education and training, and promote research.

NDEMU has an inherent interest in identifying and synthesizing a body of EM-related research and supporting its translation into practice through education and training. The benefits of a synthesized body of EM research would accrue not just to NDEMU but also to the myriad students from EM practice who have and will participate in the institution’s in-person and online education and training courses. The corpus of EM research, however, has not yet been identified or organized, much less synthesized to inform NDEMU education and training. NDEMU asked the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center (HSOAC) to map the EM research landscape.

This report describes HSOAC’s attempt to identify and map a body of EM research and discusses the implications of the mapping effort. The report concludes with recommendations regarding for facilitating the identification and organization of this research so that it might be synthesized and translated into education; training; and, ultimately, practice.

Key Takeaways

  • The number of publications available to inform NDEMU and EM generally is staggeringly large. As an example, a Web of Science search using relevant topics found 141,857 journal articles, books, and conference proceedings related to EM research published between 1990 and 2024. As large as that number is, it does not represent a definitive body of EM research.
  • The search looked for articles on specific hazards, human factors that interact with hazards to produce consequences, and such other topics as emergencies and disasters, as well as the prime areas of EM activity (preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery). However, the organization of the body of research and its use of keywords are not explicitly aligned with EM practice, making identifying appropriate research challenging and do not facilitate integration and synthesis into EM education and training. 
  • Artificial intelligence (AI), in the form of machine language models and generative large language models, can facilitate both identifying EM research from among millions of records across multiple databases and organizing it more usefully for EM on an ongoing basis.
  • Other complicating factors are that EM-related research is undertaken globally, by a diverse set of researchers, working within their own unique disciplinary paradigms and publishing in their own specialized journals. The relevant research is not always part of explicit EM-related work.

Recommendations

  • Bring together thought leaders to address important questions related to EM research, such as cementing the criteria that define EM research.
  • Maintain broad access to the databases and repositories that store EM research.
  • Leverage a combination of human expertise and AI to continually identify and organize EM research across databases and repositories that store EM research.
  • Establish an EM-specific research database.
  • Synthesize research to publish reports on the state of EM science.
  • Develop and disseminate guidance on how to find EM research.
  • Provide guidance to EM researchers who desire to affect EM with their work with respect to how they can make it discoverable and aligned to EM practice through their selection of title, keywords, and abstract language.
  • Engage with key publishers and journal editors to make EM research easier to discover.
  • Support the creation of U.S.-focused, EM-specific research funding while also engaging with existing organizations that sponsor EM research.

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Jensen, Jessica, Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, Vanessa Parks, Lea Sabbag, Michael Vincent Ryan, and Travis Merrill, Emergency Management Research: Hard to Find, Even More Difficult to Organize. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center operated by the RAND Corporation, 2026. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3025-4.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency's National Disaster and Emergency Management University (NDEMU) and conducted in the Infrastructure, Immigration, & Security Operations Program of the RAND Homeland Security Research Division, which operates the Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center.

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

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