Mapping the Publications of e-learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Since the prevalence of COVID-19, e-learning has become an extensively dominant approach of education among the Universities and institutions. This study was conducted to explore the growth, and global trend of e-learning during the COVID-19 publications and to evaluate them by analyzing various features of the research outputs. The global publications on e-learning and COVID-19, indexed in Web of Science (WOS), were retrieved and analyzed by bibliometrix package of R software. There were 491 publications retrieved and then exported in a plain text format to the bibliometrix software. The results showed that the publication on the concept of e-learning and COVID-19 started in 2020, increased rapidly after the COVID-19 pandemic, and thereafter has received increasing attention by researchers, particularly in 2021. We found that the USA is the leading country with the highest number of publications followed by India, Spain, Saudi Arabia, Jorden and the UK. Also, the findings show that“Education”, followed by“Students”, “Impact” and “Model”, have the highest frequency among keywords in the literature, indicating that e-learning is a general topic in many fields. Conceptual structure map analysis classified the e-learning and COVID-19 publications into four main clusters. This study aimed to presents a comprehensive scenario of e-learning and COVID-19 publications after the prevalence of the pandemic. The results of this paper, can contribute to the existing knowledge, via showing e-learning and COVID-19 research volumes and trends. The outcome of this paper should be considered by institutions, universities, researchers and librarians.