Mapping and Analyzing Research on COVID-19 and the Stock Market: A Bibliometric Analysis

Objective
In addition to its impact on public health, the COVID-19 pandemic posed significant challenges to global economies, particularly stock markets. Consequently, the pandemic's effects on stock markets opened diverse avenues for research. Scholars worldwide have sought to explore this topic from various perspectives. This article aims to conduct a bibliometric analysis of studies on COVID-19 and the stock market in Iran by mapping and analyzing scientific research trends in this domain.
 
Methods
This applied study employs a bibliometric approach. The statistical population comprises all articles published on the subject of COVID-19 and the stock market in Iran between February 2020 and January 2023. Data analysis was conducted using Excel, Ravar PreMap, and VOSviewer software.
 
Results
Considering the process of publishing articles in the field of COVID-19 research and the stock market in Iran, the results show that the trend of publishing articles in this field is upward, with the highest number of published articles in 2022, accounting for 26 titles and 50% of all articles. Regarding the intellectual structure of research in the field of COVID-19 and the stock market in the country, the evaluation of the intellectual structure in bibliometric analysis is usually done by examining the most frequent keywords and their co-occurrence. The most frequent keywords help identify the main topics that make up the intellectual structure of the research and word co-occurrence is used to identify clusters, track time trends, and analyze the density of keywords. These methods help introduce dominant, developed, saturated, extinct, or emerging topics. In this research, to investigate the most frequent keywords, the main words used in the title, abstract, and the keywords selected by the authors in each article were analyzed. In total, researchers in the field of COVID-19 and the stock market in Iran have used 312 main keywords in their articles. The keywords "COVID-19" (47 occurrences) and "stock market" (42 occurrences) are the most frequent in this field, followed by "financial markets," "pandemic," "crisis," "stock market index," "stock market return," and "stock return." These keywords form the main core of the topics that make up the intellectual structure of research in this field in Iran. To investigate word co-occurrence, social network mapping was used. Analysis of the social network map of word co-occurrence was conducted using three methods: 1) Analysis of clusters of the most frequent keywords, 2) Investigation of the time process of the formation of clusters of the most frequent keywords, and 3) Density analysis of the most frequent keywords. However, due to the newness of the field and the small number of articles in this area in Iran, analyzing the articles by examining the time trend and the density of the most frequent keywords would not be meaningful. Therefore, word co-occurrence was analyzed only through the examination of clusters of the most frequent keywords. Drawing the word co-occurrence map in the field of COVID-19 research and the stock market in Iran identified only one thematic cluster. This cluster includes eight main keywords: COVID-19, stock market, financial markets, epidemic, crisis, stock market index, stock market return, and stock return, all connected by red lines. Thus, it can be said that the keywords in this cluster indicate the direction of studies in the field of COVID-19 and the stock market in Iran, which has developed in recent years. Regarding cooperation networks among universities in the field of COVID-19 research and the stock market in Iran, the results show that although there has been good cooperation between universities in this field, more cooperation is expected, especially with universities in other countries.
 
Conclusion
Facilitating the process of publishing articles in this field in Iran, it is expected that the results and suggestions of this research will serve as a roadmap for researchers to explore potential research opportunities in this field.