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. 2022 Jul 26:10:895121.
doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2022.895121. eCollection 2022.

Mental Health Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Focuses and Trends

Yaodong Liang  1 , Li Sun  2 , Xin Tan  3
Affiliations

Mental Health Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Focuses and Trends

Yaodong Liang et al. Front Public Health. .

Abstract

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly influenced the world. In wave after wave, many countries suffered from the pandemic, which caused social instability, hindered global growth, and harmed mental health. Although research has been published on various mental health issues during the pandemic, some profound effects on mental health are difficult to observe and study thoroughly in the short term. The impact of the pandemic on mental health is still at a nascent stage of research. Based on the existing literature, we used bibliometric tools to conduct an overall analysis of mental health research during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Method: Researchers from universities, hospitals, communities, and medical institutions around the world used questionnaire surveys, telephone-based surveys, online surveys, cross-sectional surveys, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and systematic umbrella reviews as their research methods. Papers from the three academic databases, Web of Science (WOS), ProQuest Academic Database (ProQuest), and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), were included. Their previous research results were systematically collected, sorted, and translated and CiteSpace 5.1 and VOSviewers 1.6.13 were used to conduct a bibliometric analysis of them.

Result: Authors with papers in this field are generally from the USA, the People's Republic of China, the UK, South Korea, Singapore, and Australia. Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are the top three institutions in terms of the production of research papers on the subject. The University of Toronto, Columbia University, and the University of Melbourne played an important role in the research of mental health problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. The numbers of related research papers in the USA and China are significantly larger than those in the other countries, while co-occurrence centrality indexes in Germany, Italy, England, and Canada may be higher.

Conclusion: We found that the most mentioned keywords in the study of mental health research during the COVID-19 pandemic can be divided into three categories: keywords that represent specific groups of people, that describe influences and symptoms, and that are related to public health policies. The most-cited issues were about medical staff, isolation, psychological symptoms, telehealth, social media, and loneliness. Protection of the youth and health workers and telemedicine research are expected to gain importance in the future.

Keywords: COVID-19; bibliometric analysis; focuses; keyword clustering; mental health; trends.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The volume of COVID-19 and mental health-related articles in 2020–2022.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Country or region co-occurrence.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Author co-occurrence.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Author co-occurrence groups.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Institutions' co-occurrence.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Keyword clustering.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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