Information Technology has been applied to respond to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which has attracted increasing attention. However, there is still no comprehensive bibliometrics study in the global publications on the application of Information Technology in COVID-19. This study aimed to investigate the current research status of Information Technology in preventing and controlling the COVID-19 pandemic.

Relevant literature published between 2020 and 2022 was downloaded from Web of Science Core Collection (WoSCC) databases. Key search terms included COVID-19, big data, artificial intelligence, internet of things, cloud computing, etc. The data elements were as follows: year, countries/territories, institutions, authors, journals, research areas and citations of publications. Statistical methods and knowledge domain maps were applied to conduct contribution and collaboration, co-occurrence and co-citation analysis using VOSviewer. COOC software was used to construct the two-mode matrix, conduct hierarchical cluster analysis of high-frequency keywords and journals, and identify keywords of bursts.

A total of 10,962 articles were retrieved. The most frequent country and institution were USA (2,423, 22.10%) and the University of California System (212, 1.934%), respectively. The research areas were included but not limited to computer science (2,198, 20.051%), engineering (1,421, 12.963%) and public environmental occupational health (1,032, 9.414%). Three research hotspots were identified: (i) Internet-based social and psychological surveys; (ii) Distance education, telecommuting and telemedicine; (iii) Artificial intelligence-assisted diagnosis of COVID-19 patients. The clustering results of a two-mode matrix showed that research had the most frequent interaction with health, social media and information technology. According to co-citation analysis, a total of four clusters of journals had been obtained (clinical medicine, medicine, computer science and engineering, and public health). The keywords of burst were computer-based learning, general public, student-centered learning, etc.

Information technology has played an important role in the response to COVID-19, which belongs to the interdisciplinary field.