A systematic review of scientific literature on earthquake-induced landslides

Earthquake-induced landslides (EQILs) are severe secondary effects of a seismic event. These phenomena can produce direct and indirect damages to structure, infrastructures and to the society. EQILs can also trigger secondary hazard cascading effects and impact civil protection activities. For this reason, the scientific community over the past decades has dedicated an increasing attention to EQILs, with the publication of numerous scientific papers. In this work we describe a preliminary outcome of a comprehensive review of the main articles published on this topic from 1984 to 2021 in peer reviewed international journals. The selected articles, which have been identified after a systematic search on the Clarivate analytics’ Web of Science-Core Collection™ online platform, have been catalogued in a database, whose structure was designed to include the information preparatory for the analysis. Specifically, for each of the 798 articles we reported: a) the bibliometric information (i.e., article title, author(s), publication year, journal name and number of citations); b) the specific topic addressed by the article, which can be distinguished with respect to the scale of the analysis (i.e., regional or single slope) and the type of research (e.g., mapping, characterization/description, modelling); and c) the information related to the earthquake(s) considered in the article. In the database, we have identified 139 earthquakes whose main characteristics (e.g., date of occurrence, location, magnitude, focal mechanism) have been organized in a sub-section of the database. The analyses pointed out different commonalities between articles which allowed us to infer general aspects related to EQILs and, at the same time, to describe a comprehensive state of art on the topic.