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The onset of COVID-19 as a pandemic has impacted the whole world, thus becoming a global pandemic (Rajan & Joshi, 2020). This pandemic of COVID-19 has reminded people about the Spanish flu pandemic of the 19th century and the swine flu pandemic in the last decade. Various measures have been taken in the past to contain the spread of the COVID-19. However, the pandemic also presented the unique problem of Infodemic, i.e., an overabundance of information (Tangcharoensathien et al., 2020). The Information may or may not be true; hence, it could result in actions and behaviors that could be unnecessary and may also harm the individuals and society at large. The adoption and usage of Social Media have increased tremendously in the last decade; moreover, the lockdown strategy adopted by different countries has also increased Social Media traffic (Mutanga & Abayomi, 2020). Social media is nowadays one widely used source of information dissemination and information reception. However, there are very few mechanisms with which the authenticity of the information can be verified. Fake news, false information, or misleading information can result in barriers in promoting behaviors required for the success of measures taken to contain the pandemic. The role of social media in Covid-19 should be investigated as it will help in understanding the range and types of misconceptions propagated, which will not only help the agencies in changing the misconceptions established in the society but will also help in anticipating the types of misconceptions that could arise in future in similar situations.
This article aims to present a comprehensive evaluation of the role of social media in times of pandemic. This article has evaluated 1546 articles from the Scopus database. Robust bibliometric tools and network analysis methods are applied to identify the clusters to narrow down to the future areas of the research. This study is the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge, attempting to perform bibliometric analysis on social media role in pandemic times, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. This study has used the VosViewer (Goyal and Kumar 2021) tool of bibliometric analysis, which is considered popular among researchers in bibliometric analysis (Kawuki, Yu, and Musa 2020).
This reminder of the paper begins with the literature review of social media, fake news, and the impact of COVID-19. The following section covers the bibliometric analysis identifying the publication trends, active sources, and active countries by publications, active sources, and active funding agencies in this study. The fourth section covers the network analysis and network visualization map for the author's index keywords with a minimum occurrence of 10 to identify the common clusters. The fifth section covers the details of the adopted PRISMA technique for the systematic review of the vaccination-related fake news propagated on social media. The sixth section covers the qualitative analysis done with the help of NVIVO software. It presents the world cloud and the developed concept map presenting a schema of the impact of social media and related misconceptions and the vaccination-related conspiracy theories with the prevalent themes. Seventh, the eighth and ninth section covers discussion, conclusion, and managerial implications, respectively.