A Systematic Review of COVID-19 Geographical Research: Machine Learning and Bibliometric Approach

The rampant COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe rapidly in 2020, causing a tremendous impact on human health and the global economy. This pandemic has stimulated an explosive increase of related studies in various disciplines, including geography, which has contributed to pandemic mitigation with a unique spatiotemporal perspective. Reviewing relevant research has implications for understanding the contribution of geography to COVID-19 research. The sheer volume of publications, however, makes the review work more challenging. Here we use the support vector machine and term frequency-inverse document frequency algorithm to identify geographical studies and bibliometrics to discover primary research themes, accelerating the systematic review of COVID-19 geographical research. We confirmed 1,171 geographical papers about COVID-19 published from 1 January 2020 to 31 December 2021, of which a large proportion are in the areas of geographic information systems (GIS) and human geography. We identified four main research themes—the spread of the pandemic, social management, public behavior, and impacts of the pandemic—embodying the contribution of geography. Our findings show the feasibility of machine learning methods in reviewing large-scale literature and highlight the value of geography in the fight against COVID-19. This review could provide references for decision makers to formulate policies combined with spatial thinking and for scholars to find future research directions in which they can strengthen collaboration with geographers.