A scoping review of COVID-19 research adopting quantitative geographical methods in geography, urban studies, and planning: a text mining approach

Quantitative geographical methods have played an important role in COVID-19 research. To complement and extend previous review studies, we conduct a scoping review of COVID-19 studies employing quantitative geographical approaches by focusing on 331 papers published in 45 journals in geography, urban studies, and planning. We identify four major research themes (clusters): (1) how SARS-CoV-2 viruses spread in cities, (2) the COVID-19 mortality (death) rates and their association with socioeconomic variables, (3) how the COVID-19 pandemic changed people's mobilities, and (4) how the COVID-19 pandemic affects air pollution. We conclude that spatial models play a key role in COVID-19 quantitative geographical approaches, and human mobility is an important and widely studied topic. We also reveal a lack of research focusing on environmental pollution (other than air pollution) that potentially worsened during the pandemic.