the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 26 Aug 2024
Review article: A scoping review of human factors in avalanche decision-making
Abstract. The interest in understanding the human aspects of avalanche risk mitigation has steadily grown over the past few decades. Between 2001–2011, 11 research papers on decision-making in avalanche terrain were published in peer-reviewed journals. Between 2012–2022, this number rose to 55. These papers have been authored by researchers from various disciplines and publications in journals across different fields. Despite the field’s nascent stage, to guide future research it is pertinent to provide an overview of the insights from existing research literature.
This paper offers a systematic overview of peer-reviewed research on human factors in avalanche decision-making. The overview is based on a systematic literature search covering research published up until the end of 2022. The search was conducted across six databases, including Scopus and Web of Science, using a set of keywords related to avalanche decision-making (e.g., “decision-making,” “backcountry skiing,” “avalanche terrain,” “avalanche accident”). Out of nearly 13,000 articles containing at least one of the key search terms, 70 had a research question related to avalanche decision-making and were published in peer-reviewed academic journals. Additionally, 100 relevant papers were published as ISSW (International Snow Science Workshop) proceedings.
We coded all identified papers based on major and minor research questions, control variables, population covered, and methodology. 12 concepts described the different research themes (e.g., avalanche accidents, avalanche education, decision-making strategies). We applied the concepts to the 70 peer-reviewed papers and present them by their main concept.
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Status: open (until 07 Oct 2024)
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Benjamin Zweifel, 05 Sep 2024
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Thank you for the opportunity to review this paper. The authors provide a very valuable overview of the existing scientific literature and its content on the topic of human factors in avalanche decision making. I fully agree with the authors that although much research has been done on this topic in the last decade, it still has a lot of potential.
The present study is very carefully scientifically structured and excellently written in this paper. I congratulate the authors! Even after studying this paper in detail, I have not discovered any serious shortcomings and therefore recommend the editor to publish this paper.
I have the following minor comments:
There is confusion on the number of papers in the results: in the abstract, on page 5 and page 9 (line 285) you mention 70 papers, in Fig. 1 you state 69 papers and in the Table 2 I counted 69 papers?
Page1, line 40: I was a bit confused by the term ‘qualitative systematic scoping review’ since you later distinguish scoping review vs. systematic review (paragraph 2.1). Accordingly, I suggest skipping ‘systematic’ here.
Page3, line 105-106: It makes totally sense to me to not set a lower limit for publication year. One argument could also be, that this topic had been under research only in recent times anyway.
Page 5, Table 1: I’m not familiar with the term ‘off-bounds’. I know ‘off-piste’ or ‘out of bounds’…?
Page 9, paragraph 3.1.1: I was very surprised to not find Ian McCammon in this paragraph, since he really was the pioneer within the heuristic traps field. I guess, this is, because he didn’t publish his findings in peer-reviewed journals? Probably this can be discussed (discussion or limitation section)?
Page 14, Table 5: I suggest using exactly the same wording for the tags (Tag 1 to Tag 3) as used in Table 3. Then it seems that there is some formatting issues: I assume that there are different text sizes in this table and there is an unpleasant table break form page 16 to page 17
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Audun Hetland, 05 Sep 2024
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Dear dr.Zweifel.
Thank you very much for taking the time to review our paper and also for the detailed comments where you point out lack of clarity or mishaps that we our selves were unable to pick up in the final stage of writing up the paper.
We will address them in turn:
69 or 70 papers: Thank you very much for pointing out this. In the final stage of writing up the paper we went back and checked the final analysis one last time. We then discovered that one of the papers had been falsely discarded and therefore included this in the papers, which increased the number of papers from 69 to 70. We have apparently not been able to implement this change through out the paper and we will correct this in the text and table.Page 1, line 40: Qualitative systematic scoping review: Thank you for pointing out the lack of coherence in our terminology. We will go through the paper and make sure that we use the same terminology throwout the paper.
Page 3, line 105-106. Thank you. Yes we where curious to see what had been written about human factor back in time and therefore searched without any lower limit on publication year. However, when reviewing the results we found that all papers that matched our criterias where of newer date. So even though we did not have any lower limit we did not find any substantial contributions dating back more than two decades.
Page 5, Table 1: Thank you for pointing this out. This is mean to be out-of-bounds and we will correct this in the table.
Page 9, paragaph 3.1.1. Yes, we fully agree with you that McCammon should be given a attention and credit as his ISSW proceedings are hallmark papers in the human factor research. We initially aimed to include conference proceedings in our search. Indeed we have conducted the same search in the Montana library where the ISSW proceedings are stored - as well as other databases where conference proceedings are listed. We found 80 relevant proceeding papers solely originating from the ISSW conference. Many of these are important studies for the avalanche community and we therefore conducted the same data extraction and listing of these papers which we provide at https://osf.io/u9ydm/
It became apparent however, that in order to keep to the PRISMA guidelines for scoping reviews we needed to apply stricter rules that were not applicable to the proceeding papers. We therefore ended up only including peer-reviewed studies in this paper. As you correctly point out this is the sole reason why McCammons papers are not listed in the results. We will include his major contribution to the field in the introduction, and also clarify this in the limitation and discussion section. We hope the interested reader find our extraction and listing of the proceedings helpful even though we could not include them in the paper at the end.Page 14. Table 5. Thank you. Yes we will go back and redo the tables to correct for the formatting issues that is apparent in the pre-print and use the same description to increase clarity.
Again, thank you very much for the effort in reviewing the paper. Much appreciated.Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-AC1
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Audun Hetland, 05 Sep 2024
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-1628', Anonymous Referee #2, 12 Sep 2024
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General comments
I greatly appreciate the opportunity to review this wonderful paper. The authors have embarked upon an ambitious and pioneering review that establishes an important resource for follow-on work. Table 5 in particular will be invaluable for future researchers in this field. Overall, the work is well conceived, well executed and very readable. I concur with the previous reviewer that this paper is worthy of publication with some very minor revisions.
Specific comments
First, I agree with the excellent points raised by the previous reviewer. In particular, I appreciate the author’s willingness to address the use of the term “systematic”: I too found the term confusing with regard to the intent of the research effort. Simple wording changes would fix this issue.
Page 1, lines 35-6: As I am sure the authors are aware, the term “human factors” as used in the avalanche community differs appreciably from its meaning in the broader scientific and engineering literature. A sentence here about this usage discrepancy will avoid confusing readers from other fields.
Page 2, lines 57, 61-2: The authors define one of the functions of a scoping review as identifying knowledge gaps. They also state that one of their goals was to reveal “uncharted research areas” within the field. Section 4 could be improved with a more explicit discussion of these gaps and unexplored research areas. This brief addition would be a valuable take-away for many readers.
Page 3, Section 2.2.1: I found the treatment of ISSW papers confusing. The link leads to a coding of 81 papers, suggesting by their sheer number that these are important for a comprehensive scoping review. These papers are mentioned several times in the text despite being excluded from the thematic analysis and results. I see that the PRISMA-ScR criteria encourages the inclusion of “gray literature” in the interest of creating a comprehensive review (checklist tip sheet Item 7). I think a more detailed rationale for exclusion of ISSW papers and a more explicit discussion in the Discussion and Limitations sections would help readers understand the actual scope of this study, since most will be familiar with the ISSW and will wonder why it was not included as a source.
Section 3, Results: The authors’ framing of each theme in the broader literature followed by their specific results is wonderful and will be exceedingly useful for future researchers. Very nicely done.
Section 5, lines 532-3. The authors indicate that their study is a starting point for future work, and it certainly is. But a bit more detail would be helpful describing the specific future work the authors feel would be worthwhile (PRISMA-ScR checklist item 21). Of special interest would be what systematic reviews would be valuable and what specific aspects of “avalanche education quality” could be examined by future studies. The results of Section 3 provide a ready-made template for such a discussion, which I think would be valuable for many readers.
Technical corrections
Page 1, line 19: The abstract states 100 ISSW papers; the ISSW coding file contains 81. I think it would help readers to know up front that these papers were excluded from the paper’s results.
Page 1, line 22: Begin sentence with Twelve not 12.
Page 2, line 61: reveal is misspelled.
Page 12, line 398: trend(s)
Page 12, line 423: decision-making aid(s)
Page 13, line 446: …studies include…
Overall, this was a very enjoyable paper and it will be a worthwhile contribution to the field. Congratulations to the authors on their hard work and scientific vision. Thank you again for the opportunity to play a role in the publication of this excellent work.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1628-RC2
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