Scientometric analysis of COVID-19: A basis for developing a general theory of pandemic from scholarly communications perspective

Abstract

This study conducted a scientometric analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim of providing a foundation for developing a general theory of pandemics from a scholarly communications perspective. To achieve this, the study sought to answer a single question: How do knowledge, innovation, and environment relate to one another during a pandemic? Carayannis and Campbell (2010) posed a similar question from a different perspective, and this study builds on that by attempting to provide a framework in case another pandemic occurs. To understand the publication behavior of scholars over the five-year period from 2019 to 2024, the authors analyzed data extracted from Scopus between August 18 and 28, 2023. The search strategy used was “COVID-19 OR Coronavirus OR Coronaviruses OR SARS-CoV-2 OR 2019-nCoV.” The search yielded 511,920 results, of which 17,487 were used for this study. It was found that many countries around the globe formed six clusters. As a result, researchers from these countries continued to produce significant research outputs, leading to a high number of citations and enhancing their position within scholarly communications. An interesting finding of this research revealed new and relevant topics, prompting the authors to link these findings with the quintuple helix theory. The study recommended using empirical and theoretical models to develop theories that can further define pandemics.