Covid-19 impact on business sector activity in the EUcountries: digital issues

This article is devoted to the study of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the functioning of the business sector of European countries through bibliometric analysis. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the scientific achievements on this topic in terms of identifying key categories and phenomena that characterize the impact of COVID-19 on the activities of business entities. Methodological support for this paper includes trend and bibliometric analysis (based on VOSViewer v.1.6.10 toolkit). The results of the trend analysis showed recent stable gradual growth in the number of user search queries on business issues caused more by the COVID-19 pandemic that has become an inhibitor of economic growth and sustainable development. The object of the paper is 2406 publications indexed in the Scopus database and 4666 publications indexed in the Web of Science database on the effects of pandemics on the business sector. The time horizon of the study was in 1980-2021. According to the results of the analysis of papers indexed in the Scopus database the decreasing number of papers during 2014-2015 (from 99225 to 28836) were identified. The article identifies the top 15 Scientific Journals indexed by the Scopus and Web of Science databases in which the issue of the effects of COVID-19 on the business sector were considered most often. It is concluded that the majority of publications were published in journals that were indexed in both databases – Scopus and Web of Science. According to the results of the analysis of metadata of publications devoted to the effects of COVID-19 on the business sector, the 9 clusters by the Scopus database and 8 clusters by the WoS database were identified. The results of the bibliometric analysis devoted to the effects of COVID-19 on the business sector allowed defining 10587 keywords, the frequency of use of which exceeds 5. According to the Scopus database the most popular keywords within this problem are: humans, female, organization and management, commerce, risk assessment, economic aspect and others. At the same time, the most popular keywords in the Web of Science database are: pandemic, impact, business, performance, crisis, management, entrepreneurship, innovation.