Despite the increasing body of research on flood vulnerability, a review of the methods used in the construction of vulnerability indices is still missing. Here, we address this gap by providing a state-of-art account on flood vulnerability indices, highlighting worldwide trends and future research directions. A total of 95 peer-reviewed articles published between 2002–2019 were systematically analyzed. An exponential rise in research effort is demonstrated, with 80 % of the articles being published since 2015. The majority of these studies (62.1 %) focused on the neighborhood followed by the city scale (14.7 %). Min–max normalization (30.5 %), equal weighting (24.2 %), and linear aggregation (80.0 %) were the most common methods. With regard to the indicators used, a focus was given to socioeconomic aspects (e.g., population density, illiteracy rate, and gender), whilst components associated with the citizen's coping and adaptive capacity were slightly covered. Gaps in current research include a lack of sensitivity and uncertainty analyses (present in only 9.5 % and 3.2 % of papers, respectively), inadequate or inexistent validation of the results (present in 13.7 % of the studies), lack of transparency regarding the rationale for weighting and indicator selection, and use of static approaches, disregarding temporal dynamics. We discuss the challenges associated with these findings for the assessment of flood vulnerability and provide a research agenda for attending to these gaps. Overall, we argue that future research should be more theoretically grounded while, at the same time, considering validation and the dynamic aspects of vulnerability.

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评论文章：洪水脆弱性指数的系统回顾和未来前景

尽管对洪水脆弱性的研究越来越多，但仍缺乏对脆弱性指数构建中使用的方法的审查。在这里，我们通过提供有关洪灾脆弱性指数的最新报告，强调全球趋势和未来研究方向来解决这一差距。系统分析了2002-2019年间发表的95篇经同行评审的文章。事实证明，研究工作呈指数级增长，自2015年以来发表了80  ％的文章。这些研究中的大多数（62.1  ％）侧重于社区，其次是城市规模（14.7  ％）。最小-最大归一化（30.5  ％），等权重（24.2  ％）和线性聚合（80.0 ％）是最常见的方法。关于所使用的指标，重点放在社会经济方面（例如人口密度，文盲率和性别），而与公民的应对和适应能力有关的组成部分则略有涵盖。当前研究的空白包括缺乏敏感性和不确定性分析（分别仅占论文的9.5  ％和3.2  ％），结果验证不充分或不存在（占13.7  ％）的研究），关于权重和指标选择的基本原理缺乏透明度，以及使用静态方法（不考虑时间动态）。我们讨论了与这些发现相关的挑战，以评估洪水的脆弱性，并提供应对这些差距的研究议程。总体而言，我们认为，未来的研究应更多​​地从理论出发，同时要考虑验证和脆弱性的动态方面。