If you’ve spent any time around hazard science, you learn quickly that progress often shows up first as paperwork—papers, datasets, methods. And when MISRYOUM newsroom checked how landslide research has expanded since 1994, the pattern is hard to ignore.
Since 1994 there has been a 32 times increase in the number of research outputs with the keyword “landslide”. The underlying picture comes from tracking the number of research outputs per year that use that keyword—simple and unfiltered, as the exercise itself admits. In 1994, the number of outputs was 182; in 2025, it was 5,875, a 32x increase. That’s a big jump in the volume of our understanding of landslides. But it doesn’t automatically mean the field’s thinking has been rewritten—so, no, this isn’t a clean signal of paradigm change.
The trend also lines up with how the research ecosystem has evolved. MISRYOUM analysis points to the rise of journals that became, more or less, gathering places for a wider hazards conversation. The journal Landslides started in 2004 and has shown remarkable growth, even if it still represents a tiny proportion of the total outputs per year. Natural Hazards and Engineering Geology have also climbed substantially, while Geomorphology shows a smaller increase. Meanwhile, journals that have long been associated with landslide work—QJEGH, Canadian Geotechnical Journal and Geotechnique—have stayed essentially static over time.
So what’s going on? MISRYOUM editorial desk suggests it likely reflects growth in the number of academic areas investigating landslides—and especially a diversification away from geotechnical engineering alone. Instead, landslide research now pulls in a broader range of expertise: geomorphology, remote sensing, geophysics, natural hazards. That mix feels more like the current reality on the ground—where monitoring technology, spatial analysis, and field observations have to fit together, not just sit in separate silos. And yes, there’s a bit of a whiff of coffee in the room when people talk about this kind of shift—at least there is, in conference planning meetings—because the work is moving fast, not gently.
There’s another element MISRYOUM newsroom can’t really dodge: geography. The center of gravity has moved, and it shows up clearly in publication affiliations. MISRYOUM analysis using the same keyword-based data but filtering for national affiliation from China indicates explosive growth over the last ten years. In 2025, Chinese affiliated authors are producing 2,616 outputs. That means they are now producing over 55% of the world’s landslide research. No poetic phrasing needed—the arithmetic is the message.
The wider implication is pretty straightforward: when more than half of the output is concentrated in one country, the field’s priorities, collaborations, and even its pace will inevitably start reflecting that concentration. Misryoum editorial team noted that this doesn’t tell you everything about quality or impact, and keyword tracking can blur boundaries—some papers use “landslide” in ways that aren’t the same across disciplines. But the direction is consistent. It’s also the kind of result that helps explain why places like Queenstown, New Zealand—where the LaRGE Conference is drawing specialists—matter for bringing that global community into the same room.
In a couple of weeks time, MISRYOUM will have the pleasure of hosting an invited talk for the Landslide Risk and Geoengineering (LaRGE) Conference in Queenstown, New Zealand. The presentation will be grounded in that Scopus-based look at growth since 1994, the year that a PhD thesis was submitted. The numbers are stark; the questions they raise are less tidy—and, actually, they’re probably more interesting: how fast methods are changing, what new data streams are enabling, and whether research emphasis is shifting from explaining past failures to preventing the next one. And if the trends keep going… well, we’ll see, but not with the same certainty as a 32x curve.
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