Optimization and simulation methods in addressing COVID-19 physical distancing policy: A bibliometric analysis

COVID-19 has received tremendous attention from scholars worldwide and even being labelled as a black swan event that has disrupted every aspect of human life. Within a short time span of the pandemic, a large volume of research pertaining to COVID-19 has been published in diverse research fields. This paper adopts a bibliometric analysis to systematically evaluate the research development in the application of optimization and simulation methods to address COVID-19 physical distancing policy (OSPhyD) using Bibliometrix R package. A textual query on Scopus database using the combination of four classes of keywords;covid-19, optimization, simulation, and physical distance has returned a total of 299 original research articles and reviews published in English. Appropriate visualizations were generated to describe the collaborations between different authors, countries, and institutions, whilst co-word analysis that uses text mining technique has produced a conceptual cluster via co-occurrence network map to underscore the emerging themes in the current research interest. The main findings pinpoint that: 1) OSPhyD as a scientific research field is an emerging multidisciplinary research topic that is growing progressively and steadily in the fields of medicine, engineering, social sciences, mathematics and decision science, 2) The field has attracted the attention of scholars from all over the world particularly from United States of America, United Kingdom, European countries including authors from Asia, and 3) Three dominant themes or research front emerged from the publications including COVID-19 mainstream, medical education and undergraduate. © 2022 Author(s).