Preliminary Comments. A Scientometric Dimension of the Economic and Social Impact of COVID-19

As a conjunctural phenomenon, the pandemic crisis, through its implications and effects, affected the work and life model, and emphasized the low resilience of society, as a whole, to flexibly and effectively manage the effects, to adapt. The externalities were both positive and negative, and many of the effects are still present, with public policies aiming to build a “new normal”. The costs of the pandemic have been analysed by experts, and we refer not only to the economic ones but also to the social, cultural, psychological and other effects. The introductory chapter of the volume presents, on the one hand, a synthesis of the specialized literature, highlighting the interest of experts to understand, measure and analyse the complexity of the impact of the pandemic, and, on the other hand, motivates the thematic selection of the volume’s chapters. A scientometric analysis was developed, based on the publications in the WoS database, for the period 2020–2022 and the dependencies of the keywords were defined. The arguments for the research subjects selected to be analysed in volume were inventoried, and the aspects of interest addressed in detail in each of the chapters were briefly presented. So, the main message of the present volume could be summarized as follow “after each crisis we redefine ourselves, a “new normal” is built from the economic, social and cultural perspective, we move to a new phase of human progress, in which the balances of development are reconfigures. Main drivers should be: solidarity, inclusion, innovation, complex approach of problem-solving, and accountability.”