The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged in the last months of 2019, spread rapidly and has affected the whole world. The pandemic also affected higher education significantly, and face-to-face education in higher education institutions were suspended. Most universities have changed the teaching method from traditional to online education. Thus, more and more researchers focused on COVID-19 and distance education in higher education. The aim of the research was to examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on higher education studies in the field of distance education. For this reason, the changes in distance education research in the pre-pandemic and the pandemic period were analyzed in terms of some performance variables. Two different meta-data sets, consisting of 1322 articles for the pre-COVID-19 period and 2103 for the COVID-19 period, obtained by querying the Web of Science database, were used for analysis. Vosviewer software were used for bibliometric analysis, while Harzing's Publish or Perish software was used for h-index calculation. Publications from the two different periods were compared according to researcher(s), publication, journal, institution, and country criteria using citation analysis. The citation analysis showed that the most cited researchers of the pre-pandemic period were A.Bozkurt, B. Rienties, and D. U. Bolliger, while the most cited researchers of the post-pandemic period were C. Herodotou, J. C. Bonk and M.Y. Doo. Computer & Education ranked among the most-cited journal in the pre-pandemic period, while in the post-pandemic period, the most cited journal was Education and Information Technologies The most cited studies in the pre-pandemic period were conducted by researchers working at King Saud University and the University of South Africa, while in the post-pandemic period Universiti Teknologi Malaysia and Indiana University were in the leading position. The results clearly show that COVID-19 has given a new direction to distance education.