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Systematic literature review on identifying influencers in social networks

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Abstract

Considering the ever-increasing size and complexity of social networks, developing methods to extract meaningful knowledge and information from users’ vast amounts of data is crucial. Identifying influencers on social networks is one of the essential investigations on these networks and has many applications in marketing, advertising, sociology, behavior analysis, and security issues. In recent years, many studies have been conducted on analyzing and identifying influencers on social networks. Therefore, in this article, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has been performed on previous studies about the methods of identifying influencers. To this end, we review the definitions of influencers, the datasets used for evaluation purposes, the methods of identifying influencers, and the evaluation techniques. Furthermore, the quality assessment of the recently published papers also has been performed in different aspects to find whether research about identifying influencers has progressed. Finally, trends and opportunities for future studies about influencers’ identification are presented. The result of this SLR shows that the quantity and quality of articles in the field of identifying influencers in social networks are growing and progressive, which shows this field is a dynamic and active area of research.

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Seyed Farid Seyfosadat: Concept, Design, Methodology, Evaluation. Reza Ravanmehr: Concept, Verification, Validation, Editing.

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Appendix

Appendix

Publication venue

Type

Number

Impact factor

ACM computing surveys (CSUR)

Journal article

1

14.32

ACM transactions on internet technology (TOIT)

Journal article

1

3.135

Applied computing and informatics

Journal article

1

6.825

Applied intelligence

Journal article

2

1.58

Applied sciences

Journal article

1

2.679

Applied soft computing

Journal article

1

8.263

Artificial intelligence review

Journal article

5

9.588

Behaviour & information technology

Journal article

1

3.086

Big data mining and analytics

Journal article

1

3.7

Chaos, solitons & fractals

Journal article

1

9.922

Chinese journal of electronics

Journal article

1

0.4

Cluster computing

Journal article

1

2.303

Communications in nonlinear science and numerical simulation

Journal article

2

4.26

Complexity

Journal article

1

2.833

Computational social networks

Journal article

1

3.269

Computer science review

Journal article

1

8.757

Computers & industrial engineering

Journal article

1

7.180

Computing

Journal article

1

2.420

Concurrency and computation: practice and experience

Journal article

1

1.831

Data & knowledge engineering

Journal article

2

1.5

Digital communications and networks

Journal article

1

6.797

Entropy

Journal article

2

2.738

European journal of management and business economics

Journal article

1

2.816

Expert systems with applications

Journal article

5

8.665

Future generation computer systems

Journal article

3

7.307

Future internet

Journal article

1

3.638

Heliyon

Journal article

1

2.85

IEEE access

Journal article

5

3.476

IEEE transactions on computational social systems

Journal article

1

5.357

IEEE transactions on knowledge and data engineering

Journal article

2

6.977

IEEE transactions on multimedia

Journal article

1

6.513

IEEE transactions on network science and engineering

Journal article

1

3.894

Information fusion

Journal article

1

12.975

Information processing & management

Journal article

4

7.466

Information sciences

Journal article

3

8.233

Journal of ambient intelligence and humanized computing

Journal article

1

3.662

Journal of big data

Journal article

1

10.835

Journal of computer science and technology

Journal article

1

1.871

Journal of media business studies

Journal article

1

2.059

Journal of network and computer applications

Journal article

1

7.574

Journal of retailing and consumer services

Journal article

2

10.972

Journal of the association for information science and technology

Journal article

1

3.275

Knowledge and information systems

Journal article

1

2.531

Knowledge-based systems

Journal article

4

8.139

Mathematics

Journal article

2

2.592

Neurocomputing

Journal article

3

5.779

Online social networks and media

Journal article

2

4.42

Physica A: statistical mechanics and its applications

Journal article

10

3.778

SN applied sciences

Journal article

1

2.7

Social network analysis and mining

Journal article

1

3.868

Social networks

Journal article

1

4.144

Soft computing

Journal article

1

3.732

Sustainability

Journal article

1

3.251

21st International conference on enterprise information systems

Conference Proceedings

1

2015 International conference on behavioral, economic and socio-cultural computing (BESC)

Conference Proceedings

1

2016 2nd IEEE International conference on computer and communications (ICCC)

Conference Proceedings

1

2016 conference on technologies and applications of artificial intelligence (TAAI)

Conference Proceedings

1

2016 IEEE/ACM International conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (ASONAM)

Conference Proceedings

1

2016 International conference on computing, analytics and security trends (CAST)

Conference Proceedings

1

2017 16th IEEE International conference on machine learning and applications (ICMLA)

Conference Proceedings

1

2019 IEEE Intl Conf on dependable, autonomic and secure computing, Intl Conf on Pervasive Intelligence and Computing, Intl Conf on Cloud and Big Data Computing, Intl Conf on Cyber Science and Technology Congress (DASC/PiCom/CBDCom/CyberSciTech)

Conference Proceedings

1

2019 International Conference on Advanced Science and Engineering (ICOASE)

Conference Proceedings

1

2020 International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (CSCI)

Conference Proceedings

1

2021 3rd East Indonesia Conference on Computer and Information Technology (EIConCIT)

Conference Proceedings

1

2021 International Conference on Software Engineering & Computer Systems and 4th International Conference on Computational Science and Information Management (ICSECS-ICOCSIM)

Conference Proceedings

1

Companion Proceedings of The 2019 World Wide Web conference

Conference Proceedings

1

Conference on e-Business, e-Services, and e-Society

Conference Proceedings

1

International conference on advanced intelligent systems and informatics

Conference Proceedings

1

International conference on big data analytics and knowledge discovery

Conference Proceedings

1

International conference on smart objects and technologies for social good

Conference Proceedings

1

International conference on smart trends for information technology and computer communications

Conference Proceedings

1

International workshop on artificial intelligence and pattern recognition

Conference Proceedings

1

OTM Confederated International conferences on the move to meaningful internet systems""

Conference Proceedings

1

Proceedings of the 9th International conference on web intelligence, mining and semantics

Conference Proceedings

1

Proceedings of the 29th ACM International conference on information & knowledge management

Conference Proceedings

1

Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International conference on system sciences

Conference Proceedings

1

Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International conference on management of data

Conference Proceedings

1

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Seyfosadat, S.F., Ravanmehr, R. Systematic literature review on identifying influencers in social networks. Artif Intell Rev 56 (Suppl 1), 567–660 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-023-10515-2

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