Studying the Unknown, Publishing the Possible? Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Top Scopus Journals in Communication Sciences

As the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, scientists had little information about the virus. Consequently, the United Nations cal-led for joint efforts to disseminate scientific data about the disease. If from a medical and biological point of view, the response to the pandemic is well--known- which would be decisive in the fight against the virus -, minimal information about the communicative dimension of this crisis is shared, especially in the Communication Sciences scope, in a time when it was necessary to deliver risk messages to the population. From a sample of 20 journals with the highest impact factor in Scopus, this article tries to cha-racterize the research that focused on the pandemic with communication in the first year of this crisis (March 2020-March 2021). In the 42 papers on COVID-19, we found that researchers did not work in a logic of interna-tional partnership, as the concerns about the digital impacts of COVID-19 on society were substantially notorious.