COVID-19 Across Social Sciences Literature: A Co-Word Study

Besides the concerns about medical, health, and mental health issues as the essential parts of research on COVID-19, social sciences, and humanities research also have been affected by the situation. In this sense, the primary purpose of the current study was to map the conceptual structure of COVID-19 literature in the social sciences area. About 2587 documents related to “COVID-19” in the social sciences which indexed in the Scopus database during 2020 were considered as the research data. Based on the cohesion measure, the co-word network of COVID-19 literature in the social sciences area was cohesive. The main themes raised in the research clusters were: Environmental issues, social quality service, crisis management, social support, and COVID-19 social effects. Research results revealed that emerging thematic clusters contain topics such as climate change, environment, vulnerable populations, culture, and quality of life, fake new, and social identity. In addition, the present study also predicted that at the end of the COVID-19 pandemic, its social effects on societies could be consistent; thus, it is recommended that research on COVID-19 effects in the area of social sciences in universities and research institutions should be reconsidered.