Abstract
A bibliometric analysis was conducted on social media research in journals under the subject category “Information Science & Library Science” of the Social Science Citation Index. 646 articles were retrieved using the term “social media” as a keyword to search parts of titles, abstracts or keywords of publications. The research performance and trends were analyzed with descriptors of types and languages, characteristics, countries, journals, authorships and author keywords. Results showed that, social media research steadily increased from the period of 2002 to 2013 and the annual publication output in 2012 and 2013 were almost half of the total. A total of 9,851 pages, 29,433 cited references, 1,540 authors and 3,740 citations were identified in all 646 articles, with the average per article of 15.25 pages, 45.46 cited references, 2.38 authors and 5.79 citations. Analysis of countries and journals suggested an uneven distribution of publications on national and journal levels. The USA attained a leading position by contributing the largest share of articles. UK, Spain and China were the other three top productive countries in total publications. 73.53% of the total articles were published in 25 journals with impact factors ranging from 0 to 5. More than half (51.24%) journals had an impact factor between 1 and 3. Journal of Health Communication with 2.079 IF had published the most articles. The most commonly used author keywords appeared in the articles were “social media”, “social network”, “Internet”, “communication”, “Web 2.0”, “blog”, “Twitter”, “Facebook” and “virtual community”.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Wu, J.J., Sun, H.Y., Tan, Y.: Social media research: A review. Journal of Systems Science and Systems Engineering 22(3), 257–282 (2013)
Sensis. Yellow Pages Social Media Report (2013), http://about.sensis.com.au/IgnitionSuite/uploads/docs/Yellow%20Pages%20Social%20Media%20Report_F.PDF
The Kantar China Social Media Impact Report (2014), http://cn.kantar.com/media/633232/2014.pdf
Social Media Update (2013), http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2013/Social-Media-Update.aspx
2013 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/SocialMediaMarketingIndustryReport2013.pdf
Bullard, S.B.: Writing on the Wall: Social Media-The First 2,000 Years. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 91(1), 182–183 (2014)
Gao, J.: Producing the Internet: Critical Perspective of Social Media. International Journal of Communication 8, 165–167 (2014)
Mesquita, A.: Social Media for Academics: A Practical Guide. Online Information Review 37(6), 987–988 (2013)
Garfield, E.: Citation Indexing for Studying Science. Nature 227(5259), 669–671 (1970)
Boyack, K.W., Klavans, R., et al.: Mapping the backbone of science. Scientometrics 64(3), 351–374 (2005)
Persson, O., Danell, R., Schneider, J.W.: How to use Bibexcel for various types of bibliometric analysis. In: Åström, F., Danell, R., Larsen, B., Schneider, J. (eds.) Celebrating scholarly communication studies: A Festschrift for Olle Persson at his 60th Birthday, pp. 9–24. International Society for Scientometrics and Informetrics, Leuven (2009)
Chuang, K.Y., Huang, Y.L., Ho, Y.S.: A bibliometric and citation analysis of stroke-related research in Taiwan. Scientometrics 72(2), 201–212 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gan, C., Wang, W. (2014). A Bibliometric Analysis of Social Media Research from the Perspective of Library and Information Science. In: Li, H., Mäntymäki, M., Zhang, X. (eds) Digital Services and Information Intelligence. I3E 2014. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology, vol 445. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45526-5_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-45526-5_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-45525-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-45526-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)