This work discusses a bibliometric analysis of the papers published during 2020 about COVID-19 and three relevant economic keywords: GDP, unemployment, and innovation. Considering different outcomes, a significant diversity of journals without the focus on economic issues publishing articles discussing the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic was observed. The authors have also suggested some correlated dimensions between the number of articles authored by researchers affiliated to different universities of diverse countries and the severity of the pandemic indicators observed for these spaces.
TopIntroduction
The pandemic identified as Covid-19 brought a set of exceptional challenges for the scientific community (Squazzoni et al., 2020). If, on the one hand, the urgency created by the numbers of deaths and the speed of the disease's spread put pressure on the search for a vaccine that could be tested as effective on a global scale, on the other hand, the new rhythms of social interaction and changes in academic work structures have provided additional opportunities for academic reflection (Rosales-Mendoza et al., 2020), also focused on the need for adequate public policies (Lu et al., 2021), definitions of social confinement/lockdown and reduction of economic activity with minimal subsequent impact (Beyer et al., 2021; Lovric et al., 2021; Straka et al., 2021; Vukic et al., 2021).
Thus, based on the digital resources on a global scale that exist today, we have been able to witness a unique proliferation of academic works focused on the pandemic and its implications (Anazco et al., 2021). Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary academic works have emerged alongside specific works in the most-pressured areas. Thus, alongside multiple works in the areas of Health Sciences, works in the areas of Social Sciences, Engineering or even Linguistic Sciences have appeared in unprecedented frequency (Ruiz-Real et al., 2020).
In view of this proliferation, we believe it currently has clear needs for reflection. For this reflection, the bibliometric analysis may bring interesting contributions, namely for the scientific community (El Mohadab et al., 2020). In addition to the natural wealth of publications centered on Covid-19, which are numerous, their diversity, the heterogeneity of results, or the associated public implications requires such arrangement in appropriate methodological resources.
The bibliometric analysis proposed here – and given the focus of this book – focuses on three sub-themes associated with the pandemic. Thus, we will focus on the identified publications related to Covid-19 and Unemployment, Covid-19 and National Production (GDP), and Covid-19 and Entrepreneurship. We could have chosen any other sub-themes of Economics and Management but reasons of current relevance, reflected in the significant frequency of the number of publications identified in these sub-themes, prevailed.
Thus, the structure of this work is as follows. In section 2, we carry out a review of the literature on the subject and elucidate the steps of our methodological process for bibliometric discussion. In section 3, we complete the steps and discuss the achieved results, namely in the following analysis structures: distribution of the identified documents, Number of Records for Research Areas, Number of Records for Languages, Number of Records for Countries, and Number of Records for the Sources. Section 4 concludes.