Studying the Unknown, Publishing the Possible? Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Top Scopus Journals in Communication Sciences

Abstract

As the WHO declared the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, scientists had little information about the virus. Consequently, the United Nations called for joint efforts to disseminate scientific data about the disease. If from a medical and biological point of view, the response to the pandemic is well-known - which would be decisive in the fight against the virus -, minimal information about the communicative dimension of this crisis is shared, especially in the Communication Sciences scope, in a time when it was necessary to deliver risk messages to the population. From a sample of 20 journals with the highest impact factor in Scopus, this article tries to characterize the research that focused on the pandemic with communication in the first year of this crisis (March 2020-March 2021). In the 42 papers on COVID-19, we found that researchers did not work in a logic of international partnership, as the concerns about the digital impacts of COVID-19 on society were substantially notorious.