Domain analysis of the literature on COVID-19 in Information Science’s national context

Abstract

In the past two years, science has been mobilized around studies centered on the new pandemic phenomenon known as COVID-19, a variation of the coronavirus with higher transmission capacity and higher mortality. Thus, as a way of investigating the state of the art of this topic in the field of Information Science, this research sought to answer the following question: what is the Brazilian scientific production in Information Science regarding the COVID-19 pandemic? As main justification, we understand that systematically identifying and disseminating those studies may help the construction of an appropriate theoretical survey on the theme in the national scope. To support our research theoretically and methodologically, we reserved a section to explore Domain Analysis (DA). Proposed by Hjørland and Albrechtsen (1995) around Information Science, this approach allows us to analyze domains of knowledge from their social interactions as discursive communities. Then, we describe the context of information in health, specifically the COVID-19 pandemic context. This is a quali-quantitative research: we made a textual analysis of the keywords found in the articles that make up the corpus and applied bibliometric criteria to identify occurrence patterns of the most productive authors and journals. Being a descriptive-exploratory research, we aimed to describe how the pandemic phenomenon influenced textual production in the context of Information Science, seeking to better explore the theme and look for possible understandings and reflections about the subject. It was possible to infer that the scientific dissemination of knowledge around this theme is closely related to research in information in health, and it even includes a new term in this perspective: “infodemia” (infodemic), a term that is related to the vastness of information made available via the web, especially on social media. In addition to that, the incidence frequency of terms such as comunidade (community) and competência em informação (information competence).