Analysis of the scientific production of the effect of COVID-19 on the environment: A bibliometric study

Abstract

The fight against COVID-19 since January 2020 has become the top priority of more than 200 countries. In order to offer solutions to eradicate this global pandemic, the scientific community has published hundreds of articles covering a wide range of areas of knowledge. With the aim of synthesizing these publications, academics are resorting to bibliometric analyses from the perspectives of the disciplines such as biology, medicine, socioeconomics and tourism. Yet no bibliometric analysis has explored the diffuse and little-known growth of COVID-19 scientific publications in the field of environmental studies. The current study is the first of this type to fill this research gap. It has resorted to SciMAT software to evaluate the main topics, authors and journals of publications on the subject of COVID-19 combined with environmental studies spanning the period between 1 December 2019 and 6 September 2020. The search yielded a collection of 440 articles published in scientific journals indexed on by Web of Science and Scopus databases. These publications can be broken down into six main themes: (i) a sharp reduction in air pollution and an improvement of the level of water pollution; (ii) the relationship of wind speed (positive), ultraviolet radiation (positive) and humidity (negative) with the rate of infections; (iii) the effect of the pandemic on the food supply chain and waste habits; (iv) wastewater monitoring offers a great potential as an early warning sign of COVID-19 transmission; (v) artificial intelligence and smart devices can be of great use in monitoring citizen mobilization; and (vi) the lessons gleaned from the pandemic that help define actions to mitigate climate change. The results of the current study therefore offer an agenda for future research and constitute a starting point for academics in the field of environmental studies to evaluate the effects of COVID-19.

Assessment of potential benefits of traffic and urban mobility reductions during COVID-19 lockdowns: dose-response calculations for material corrosions on built cultural heritage

“…The reduction in gas consumption and sharp reduction in international and domestic air traffic have also an important role in the reduction of the SO 2 levels around the world (Biswas et al 2020 ; Filonchyk and Peterson 2020 ; Pei et al 2021 ). Regarding O 3 , as a secondary pollutant, due to the NOx-sensitive regime, the observed reduction in NOx emissions would cause an increase in O 3 levels under a potential VOC-sensitive regime (Tables 3 – 4 and Figure 4 ) (Broomandi et al 2020 ; Casado-Aranda et al 2021 ; Kaskaoutis et al 2021 ; Kerimray et al 2020 ; Kumari and Toshniwal 2020 ; Lian et al 2020 ; Lokhandwala and Gautam 2020 ).…”

The research on COVID-19 and economy from 2019 to 2020: analysis from the perspective of bibliometrics

“…There are also some bibliometrics analyses that focus on some specific countries or regions (Gallegos et al, 2020;Raju & Patil, 2020) or publication sources (Oh & Kim, 2020). Beyond that, most of the bibliometrics analyses focus on some specific topics or fields, including COVID-19 and environment (Casado-Aranda et al, 2021;, mental health and COVID-19 (Maalouf et al, 2021), COVID-19 and machine learning (Chiroma et al, 2020;De Felice & Polimeni, 2020), COVID-19 and business and management (Rodrigues et al, 2020;Verma & Gustafsson, 2020), etc.…”

Nonlinearity in the relationship between COVID-19 cases and carbon damages: controlling financial development, green energy, and R&D expenditures for shared prosperity

“…Tang et al ( 2021 ) greatly emphasized the need to promote nanomaterial in utilizing pneumonia treatment to address the COVID-19 pandemic efficiently. Casado-Aranda et al ( 2021 ) found that scientific publications on writing COVID-19 pandemic are flared with the mixing of strategies and policies that need to be confined to strategic thinking and operational procedures the meaningful and smart inferences. The more traces found from the recent literature that confirmed the viability of innovation and green production process to improve healthcare sustainability agenda, which is likely to reduce coronavirus cases (see Mohideen et al 2021 ; Arribas-Ibar et al 2021 ; Ranjbari et al 2021 ; Dean et al 2021 ; Su and Urban 2021 ; Wang et al 2021 ).…”