The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause a collapse in the health systems and economies
of many countries around the world, after 2 years of struggle and with the number of cases
still growing exponentially. Health communication has become as essential and necessary for control
of the pandemic as epidemiology. This bibliometric analysis identifies existing contributions,
jointly studying health communication and the pandemic in scientific journals indexed. A systematic
search of the Web of Science was performed, using keywords related to COVID-19 and health
communication. Data extracted included the type of study, journal, number of citations, number of
authors, country of publication, and study content. As the number of scientific investigations has
grown, it is necessary to delve into the areas in which the most impactful publications have been
generated. The results show that the scientific community has been quick to react by generating an
extraordinary volume of publications. This review provides a comprehensive mapping of contributions
to date, showing how research approaches have evolved in parallel with the pandemic. In
2020, concepts related to mental health, mass communication, misinformation and communication
risk were more used. In 2021, vaccination, infodemic, risk perception, social distancing and telemedicine
were the most prevalent keywords. By highlighting the main topics, authors, manuscripts
and journals since the origin of COVID-19, the authors hope to disseminate information that can
help researchers to identify subsisting knowledge gaps and a number of future research opportunities.
