A bibliometric analysis on the influence of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic

There is limited literature that discusses the trends of social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. This bibliometric analysis aims to evaluate the global research growth on "social media and COVID-19" by analysing related publications in the Scopus database. The objectives are to examine the research trends related to social media and COVID-19 as well as details of co-authorship, leading institutions and countries, top scholars, and leading author keywords. The study used the VOS Viewer 1.6.11 software to analyse the collected bibliographic data and visualise the global research trends using bibliometric maps. A total of 1, 994 journal articles from the Scopus database published in 2020-2021 was analysed. The leading countries in social media and COVID-19 research are United States and United Kingdom. Among the 15 leading universities, four can be found in the world's top-40 university ranking. Among the social media platforms, Twitter was found to have the most linkages with social media, which suggests that Twitter is the most frequently used platform to disseminate pandemic information. Based on the author keywords analysis, "older adults" and "health policy" are potential areas of concern that future research could fruitfully explore. This paper has significant implications for healthcare academicians, organisations, and policymakers in understanding the global trends of "social media and COVID-19".