Public libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic: A bibliometric analysis

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to changes in many service jobs. Considering the great importance and impact of this epidemic, the aim of this research is to analyze articles related to public library services and COVID-19.

The present study is descriptive and applied and using common methods in scientometrics, it examines the research conducted in the field of public libraries and COVID-19 in the Web of Science database, from 2020 to 2023. Research data through combined search of keywords "COVID-19" OR "SARS-CoV-2" OR "2019-nCoV" OR "2019 coronavirus" OR "2019 novel coronavirus" and public library keyword in Bib TeX format in Notepad text file format was extracted and transferred to Excel software, and then data analysis was done using Excel software and Bibliometrics library from R software.

Based on the data obtained from the research, the growth of scientific publications in this field was negative, and in terms of vocabulary frequency, "public libraries", "information", "society" and "social networks" are the most frequent in researches of public libraries and COVID-19. Findings related to clustering led to the formation of 4 clusters. The "Services, Challenges and Technology" cluster was central and had a higher density and centrality than other clusters. The "Access and Information Presentation Models" cluster was found to be non-central. The "Libraries and Information Literacy" cluster was placed in the underdeveloped region of the strategic diagram and finally "Society, COVID-19 and the role of libraries" cluster was introduced as an immature cluster.

According to the abundance of keywords and clusters obtained from the strategic diagram, it was found that the thematic fields of "services, challenges and technology" are the most important emerging factors in this field. Research trends in this field can be planned for further new research in order to cover less work done in these fields.