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.


INTRODUCTION
The rapid worldwide spread of the COVID-19 pandemic had unexpected effects on the medical, economic, social, cultural, and political spheres of all countries.Along with these undesirable rapid changes, the world scientific community faced one of its serious challenges to find a solution to end this disastrous pandemic.Therefore, a plethora of research in various fields has focused on COVID-19 and its influences on people's lives.The field of bibliometrics, in turn, is experiencing a considerable movement in research to identify and assess the research trends in COVID-19 literature.Table 1 represents tabular literature summaries of bibliometric research on COVID-19.
A review of global trends in COVID-19 research from the bibliometric perspective reveals main thematic areas: complementary research in virus and coronavirus and identifying virus and coronavirus types and strains.These thematic areas will mainly support subject areas such as virology, veterinary sciences, biochemistry, molecular biology, immunology, infectious diseases, pharmacology, general medicine, and public health. 1cording to Ruiz-Real, Nievas-Soriano, and Uribe-Toril [11] research on COVID-19 has gone beyond the health sciences studies and other scopes (e.g., social sciences, technology, art and humanities) have accounted for important shares of this research field.Bibliometric analyses of COVID-19 related research in social sciences area indicated that the challenges of the tourism and transportation industries during the pandemic have received particular attention. [16,17,24]][27] In this sense, infodemic information demonstrated that anxiety and depression were more prevalent among people who have been more exposed to the pandemic news on social media. [26]However, some evidence suggests that the level of psychological distress reduced by prolonging the pandemic period. [26]More importantly, there is always a level of questionable and unreliable information shared by people on social media. [30]nerally, considering the literature review (Table 1) in can be said that, the number of bibliometric research with special focus on co-word and cluster analysis which assess the research trends of COVID-19 literature in the field of social sciences are scarce.It seems that it is necessary to conduct research using co-word analysis in non-health scientific areas such as social sciences in order to:
-Mapping the conceptual structure of COVID-19 literature in the social sciences area based on the cohesion measures, and -Identifying central and emerging thematic clusters of COVID-19 literature in the social sciences area based on co-word analysis.
Thus, the present study was conducted to reach a semantic structure and to evaluate non-health scientific areas regarding to the COVID-19 pandemic.In co-word analysis, it is assumed that the most frequent words have a greater impact on a domain.Also, such analysis allowed us to reveal the developed clusters as well as emerging clusters in order to predict the direction of future research.In this regard, the research workflow including methodology, data collection, process and analytical techniques were demonstrated in Table 2.

Network clustering coefficient and density
Network clustering coefficient was introduced by Watts and Strogatz [31] and it is the average clustering coefficient of all keywords in the network. [32]In the present study, the network clustering coefficient of the research network was 6.62 that means an average of 6.5 keywords are concentrated around each keyword (Figure 1).Also, the average distance between network nodes was 1.64 indicating a close distance between the nodes (descriptors/keywords).The network had 179 nodes with 20532 links representing its high level of cohesion.
Furthermore, the connectedness of a network is determined through density measurement, which is the ratio of the power of all nodes to display the number of possible connections.Thus, the higher the density, the greater the cohesiveness within the network. [32]In the current research, the network density was 0.33 suggesting 33% of all possible connections in the network were displayed.

Network clustering and mapping
Network clustering of the research data was performed by applying correlation method with a fit of 0.257 in UCINET software.Based on the similarities and the cohesion of the keywords, five clusters were identified.Table 3 demonstrated the details of each cluster including the main themes, subthemes and the keywords.
Briefly, according to the data (Table 3), the main themes raised in the research clusters were: environmental issues, social quality service, crisis management, social support, and COVID-19 social effects.To identify the central and emerging themes, strategic diagram of the clusters was drawn using UCINET software and keywords with highest frequencies and link strength mapped in VOSviewer (Figure 1).
The strategic diagram illustrated the centrality and density of each thematic cluster (Figure 1).In general, the higher the centrality of a thematic cluster, the more significant that cluster is.In addition, the higher the density of a thematic cluster, the more mature and developed that cluster is.The clusters located at the top right of the diagram have a high centrality and density so they are the most mature and developed clusters of the research area.The clusters at the top left of the diagram are not central but are somewhat developed.The clusters at the bottom left are marginal and insignificant, while the clusters at the bottom right, although central, are developing and emerging. [33]Therefore, according to the Figure 1, cluster 4 and 5 were the most significant and central clusters of COVID-19 literature in the social sciences area.It is obvious that these clusters contain the highest frequency keywords and cover topics related to the onset of the pandemic, such as health control, quality of life, social rights, and the limitations and social effects of the pandemic, such as psychology, financial issues, and education.In this regard, Chaturvedi et al. [34] findings indicated that the Covid-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the mental health, education, and daily routine of students. On the other hand, Malhotra [35] reported that unemployment occurred in many sectors of the society because of the enforced lockdown that consequently resulted in anxiety and obsessive behaviour.
According to the Figure 1, thematic clusters of 1 to 3 were also central but emerging and still developing mainly due to the small number of the keywords in these clusters.Also, the thematic content of these clusters showed since the beginning of the pandemic the initial fears and limitations decreased and the researchers have also turned their attention to the other critical effects such as environment, climate change, and vulnerable populations.But, themes such as health care services, social welfare, and crisis management were still among the central themes.It is interesting that in cluster 3 (Table 3) research themes such as coping behaviour, crime, loneliness, mental disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, solidarity, suicide, violence, and mortality were among the emerging topics suggesting research in the field of psychology was shifting to the long-term psychological effects of this pandemic.Moreover, the results of the current study suggested that topics related to social life such as mass media, social behaviour, and social media during the pandemic were the interesting subjects to the researchers in the area of social sciences, especially those in the field of psychology.In this regard, Nawaz and Sajeel [22] believe that people who were more exposed to COVID-19 news on social media were more prone to depression.Furthermore, it was confirmed that fake news during the pandemic could affect people's mental health [30] as also indicated in the present study.

CONCLUSION
Overall, the findings of the present research indicated the COVID-19 pandemic could affect particular aspects of human social and individual life, as it was reflected in the social sciences research on COVID-19.Also, the attention to non-health scientific disciplines in research on COVID-19 had increasing trend.In addition, our 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.Therefore, the findings of the current study suggested that in separate research, the conceptual structure and research trends related to the above-mentioned fields should be investigated separately by using bibliometric methods; so as to benefit not only the scientific community but also policymaking as part of effort to properly respond to COVID-19 pandemic.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.

Table 2 : Workflow of the research. Figure
1: Strategic diagram of the research clusters and link strength map of the keywords network.