COVID-19 Vaccination: What Do We Expect for the Future? A Systematic Literature Review of Social Science Publications in the First Year of the Pandemic (2020–2021)

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has had wide-reaching societal and economic effects and a return to “normal” will take years to accomplish. In light of this situation, the most important advancement since COVID-19′s emergence has been the development of multiple, life-saving, vaccines. Academic research on vaccine has been extensive. It is estimated that in only one year it has been produced more published and indexed papers on this single issue than in the last twenty years on any other single issue, thus, necessitating some organization. This research consists of a systematic literature review of the social science publication on COVID-19 published in the first year of the pandemic (February 2020 to March 2021). This review is important because it occurs at a time when vaccines have begun their global distribution and the best efforts to address the pandemic is through vaccination programs. In this research, 53 papers published in relevant journals are analyzed out of the almost 30,000 articles retrieved from Scopus database. The analysis conducted relies on two different types: descriptive analysis (evolution at the time of citations; evolution over time of keywords; bibliographical mapping of countries, the top 10 most influential papers), and bibliometric analysis for content evaluation. A cluster analysis was performed for the latter. Clustering the research papers, based on the actual content of papers, found there to be five research areas: (1) economic aspects; (2) ethics and legal aspects; (3) health communication; (4) policies and crisis management, and (5) political issues. Yet, this article’s results paint a picture of literature that has not yet considered the full scope of COVID-19’s effect on the economic, political, and population level health and well-being. Nor has it considered these effects across the global community, suggesting new potential areas of research and giving a perspective of what we should expect for the future.