The Features and Trends of the Economic Literature Related to COVID-19: A Bibliometric Analysis

COVID-19 has been one of the greatest survival threats and economic crises in history, and researchers in the field of economics have made significant contributions with respect to various economic issues. This study presents a bibliometric analysis of the 1,396 articles related to COVID-19 that were published in economics journals indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) over the 2019-2021 period, and it provides helpful insights into the number, share and length of publications, the rate of cooperation, comparative statistics with economic studies related to other pandemics, analyses of countries and institutions, and citation analysis. A co-word analysis based on the keywords and thematic noun phrases in the titles and abstracts of the sample papers is used to explore hot research topics (e.g., lockdown, health, policy, employment, stock market, social distancing, poverty, mortality, food security, global financial crisis, supply chains, mental health), and detailed content analysis on all these research hotspots is conducted. This study does not focus on so-called rankings, which is different from general bibliometric research and COVID-19-related literature analysis research, and the results complement existing works.