According to this article's abstract: 

"Introduction: The aim of this research is to analyze how the COVID-19 was studied by the academic discipline of journalism, regarding its impact, methodology, thematic and source, and their repercussions on cites. Methodology: A universe of 124 articles is obtained through algorithmic grouping by InCites (journalism micro topic, Spanish affiliation and COVID-19 keyword). A bibliometric analysis is performed, accompanied by a qualitative content analysis to generate common codes in methodology, themes, and use of sources. Quantitative analysis of co-occurrence and descriptive correlations between the three variables studied and their citations are carried out. Results: Articles on COVID-19 received five times more citations than the rest. The majority of cites (86%) are concentrated in the first-published articles. Classic methodologies were mostly used (49% content analysis, 16% surveys). Bibliographic review (13 cites/article) and the advanced automated analysis techniques (10.75 cites/article) are the ones that receive the most citations. The main theme is disinformation (26%, 11,0 cites/article) and the most common source is the press (27%, 6,15 cites/article), although social networks (22%, 9.12 cites/article) and fact-checkers (10%, 8.50 cites/article) generated a greater impact. Discussion and Conclusions: The articles that were published during the first months generated the highest volume of citations. In journalism research, a recurrent use of classic strategies (content analysis, press) was found, although the slightly more novel approaches (advanced automated analysis techniques) are the ones that produced the most citations. Misinformation becomes one of the key issues in journalism studies. Unusual methodologies and themes receive practically no citations."