A Bibliometric Analysis of Corona Pandemic in Social Sciences: A Review of Influential Aspects and Conceptual Structure

Adeel Nasir; Kamran Shaukat; Ibrahim A Hameed; Suhuai Luo; Talha Mahboob Alam; Farhat Iqbal

doi:10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3008733

A Bibliometric Analysis of Corona Pandemic in Social Sciences: A Review of Influential Aspects and Conceptual Structure

IEEE Access. 2020 Jul 13:8:133377-133402. doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3008733. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Adeel Nasir¹, Kamran Shaukat^{2

3}, Ibrahim A Hameed⁴, Suhuai Luo², Talha Mahboob Alam⁵, Farhat Iqbal³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Management SciencesLahore College for Women University Lahore 54000 Pakistan.
² School of Electrical Engineering and ComputingThe University of Newcastle Callaghan NSW 2308 Australia.
³ Punjab University College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab Lahore 54590 Pakistan.
⁴ Department of ICT and Natural SciencesNorwegian University of Science and Technology 7491 Trondheim Norway.
⁵ Department of Computer ScienceUniversity of Engineering and Technology Lahore 54890 Pakistan.

Abstract

Corona pandemic has affected the whole world, and it is a highly researched area in biological sciences. As the current pandemic has affected countries socially and economically, the purpose of this bibliometric analysis is to provide a holistic review of the corona pandemic in the field of social sciences. This study aims to highlight significant, influential aspects, research streams, and themes. We have reviewed 395 journal articles related to coronavirus in the field of social sciences from 2003 to 2020. We have deployed 'biblioshiny' a web-interface of the 'bibliometrix 3.0' package of R-studio to conduct bibliometric analysis and visualization. In the field of social sciences, we have reported influential aspects of coronavirus literature. We have found that the 'Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report' is the top journal. The core article of coronavirus literature is 'Guidelines for preventing health-care-associated pneumonia'. The most commonly used word, in titles, abstracts, author's keywords, and keywords plus, is 'SARS'. Top affiliation is 'The University of Hong Kong'. Hong Kong is a leading country based on citations, and the USA is on top based on total publications. We have used a conceptual framework to identify potential research streams and themes in coronavirus literature. Four research streams are found by deploying a co-occurrence network. These research streams are 'Social and economic effects of epidemic disease', 'Infectious disease calamities and control', 'Outbreak of COVID 19,' and 'Infectious diseases and the role of international organizations'. Finally, a thematic map is used to provide a holistic understanding by dividing significant themes into basic or transversal, emerging or declining, motor, highly developed, but isolated themes. These themes and subthemes have proposed future directions and critical areas of research.

Keywords: Bibliometric analysis; COVID survey; COVID-19; SARS; biblioshiny; conceptual structure; coronavirus; pandemic; r-studio; social sciences.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway.