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ABSTRACT
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, scholars mobilized their efforts to address its far-reaching societal problems. With mobility restrictions being front and center of the pandemic, a new cohort of transportation science was developed within a short period of time. Here, we examine more than 400 studies related to COVID-19 published across transportation journals during 2020 and 2021. The aim is (i) to scope this newly developed segment of transportation research, (ii) outline the diversity of pandemic-related issues across various divisions of the transportation field and (iii) provide a roadmap for the future of this line of research. Common themes are identified and existing congruence and discrepancies across findings are discussed. Results show that although conventional methods of transportation research were adopted in virtually all COVID-19 studies, no pre-pandemic study was particularly instrumental in the development of this segment of transportation literature. The COVID-19 segment appears to have developed its own independent knowledge foundation, in that, it does not systemically and frequently look back at any particular pre-pandemic reference. Potential impacts of this newly developed segment on the metrics of transportation journals are quantified and discussed.
Acknowledgments
This research was funded by Australian Research Council grant DE210100440. The authors are grateful for the constructive feedback received from four anonymous referees.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Apple. Mobility Trends Report. 2020. https://www.apple.com/covid19/mobility. Accessed July 15, 2020
2. The relative growth of the field in 2021 compared to 2020 (nearly 12%) does in fact constitute one of the sharpest rises in the growth of the transport-related literature over the last decade.