Abstract: This study provides an overview of leveraging social media in natural disaster from perspectives of research fields and methods. The main findings are as follows: (1) the research fields are natural disaster prevention, detection & notification of natural disaster events, characteristics of information dissemination, detection & control of rumor and inaccurate information, natural disaster relief, emotion & social tie, motivation & behavior characteristics, maintaining social media communications during natural disaster, and community resilience; (2) content analysis, text mining, framing theory, social network analysis, case study, interview, and statistical methods are widely used. Based on the results, this paper points out the limitations of the researches, and proposes the future research work for researchers.

Key words: Social media, 　Social networking service, 　Micro-blogging, 　Natural disaster, 　Disaster relief, 　Information distribution