Bibliometric Analysis of Articles on COVID-19 in the Transportation Industry: An Early Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in Wuhan, China in November 2019 and affected the whole world, deeply affected the transportation industry as well as all sectors. The magnitude of the effects is also reflected in the number of academic publications, and the publication pool that would occur in decades has emerged in only 3 years. In this study, a quantitative bibliometric analysis, consisting of performance and collaboration analyses, was conducted to examine the vast publication pool in the context of the transportation sector. "Articles, final versions of articles and articles published in English only" filters were used to limit data. As the time limit, the years 2019-2022 were chosen. As a result of the search made in the Scopus database, a total of 951 articles were reached. R statistical program was used for data analysis and Biblioshiny was used for visualizations. Analyzes were carried out both in the context of all transport modes and separately for each transport mode. The results show that a total of 2605 authors were employed in 951 articles, 155 articles were single-authored, and 796 articles were multi-authored. Results of the analysis have revealed that the most productive countries are the USA and China, the most used keyword is “COVID-19”, the most cited country is Norway, the countries with the most publication cooperation in the context of country collaborations are UK and Hong Kong, the lowest cooperation rate belongs to Türkiye and South Africa. On the other hand, it has been determined that the author with the most academic studies on COVID-19 for transport modes is HAN H. In this study, the most important result revealed within the scope of performance analyzes and cooperation analyzes is that development level of the country and the importance given to education are important variables in country productivity. As the level of development and the importance given to education increase, the number of academic studies also increases. On the other hand, another important result revealed in the study is that early COVID-19 studies receive more citations and occupy central positions in citation networks. In addition, it can be mentioned that method studies are also cited more.