A Bibliometric Analysis on Global Psychological and Behavioral Research Landscape on COVID-19 Pandemic.

Xilu Dong,Fei Shu,Juntao Wang,Junping Qiu,Xuqiu Wei,Qiang Su,Ning Liu

doi:10.3390/ijerph19020879

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak in December 2019 has spread globally. The ongoing psychological and behavioral effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which poses a major challenge to humanity, are of concern to researchers. To understand the academic community’s attention, focus and research collaboration on psychological and behavioral research during the COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted a macro analysis using a bibliometric approach. Using the topic selection strategy of TS = (“COVID-19” OR “coronavirus disease 2019” OR “SARS-CoV-2” OR “2019-nCoV”) AND TS = (“behavio*”) AND TS = (“psycholog*”), 2096 high-quality research articles and reviews were downloaded as data from the Web of Science core collection on 16 November 2021. Through analysis and visualization, the following conclusions are drawn in this study: (1) The popularity and importance of psychological and behavioral research under COVID-19 has increased significantly and needs further attention; (2). Related research focuses on eight hotspots, with quarantine, health care workers, the elderly, students, pregnant women, family, consumers, social media and emergency preparedness knowledge as the focus of the research object; and (3) Research collaboration is relatively high at the author, organizational and national levels. However, low-income countries need to get more attention. Furthermore, this article would help researchers make decisions for the research of psychological and behavioral issues under COVID-19 and planning for future prospects to contribute to academic development and applied methodology.

Highlights

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019 has developed into a global pandemic and become the world’s largest pandemic since the Spanish flu in 1918 [1]
It is worth mentioning that when we retrieved COVID-19 related articles on the same day, the results showed that there were more than 30 related documents that had been published in 2019, which indicates that research in the field of psychology and behavior is lagging as a subtopic of COVID-19
In the current study we only consider the count obtained on the day of download, the citation frequency of these articles may increase as more articles are published

Summary

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic that broke out at the end of 2019 has developed into a global pandemic and become the world’s largest pandemic since the Spanish flu in 1918 [1]. The pandemic affects people’s daily lives in many areas [2,3,4]. These impacts are caused by COVID-19 itself, and due to measures such as the lockdown and quarantines, the expansion of social distance, and classification and management of health. Some literature has demonstrated that these measures have an obvious effect on COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control [8,9,10]. Psychological health issues may hinder the advancement of COVID-19 pandemic prevention and control to a certain extent, especially when fake news and false information are disseminated

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion