Social Media Research: A Scientometric Assessment of World Publications Output during 2001–2014

The paper examines world publications output on social media research (46354) published during 2001–2014. The publications data, sourced from Scopus database, averaged annual 14.61% growth. The paper profiles top 25 most productive organizations that accounted for 12.46% world share, and top 25 most productive authors that accounted for 2.34% world share on indicators such as average productivity, citations per paper, h‑index, and share of international collaborative publications during 2001–2014. The distribution of world output by country of publication is highly skewed. The top 15 most productive countries account for bulk of the world output (82.40%). The USA has emerged as the world leader both in its world share and citations impact of social media research output. Blogs, among social media sites, accounted for the largest publication share 27.45%, followed by Facebook (16.75%), Twitter (15.86%), Wikipedia (10.58%), YouTube (7.24%), Flickr (3.94%), MySpace (1.73%), LinkedIn (1.21%), etc., during 2001–2014. Computer science accounted for the highest publications share (55.22%) of world publications output on social media, followed by social sciences (26.55%), engineering (13.52%), medicine (10.14%), business, management and accounting (8.72%), arts and humanities (5.95%), psychology (3.68%), etc., during 2001–2014. The top 30 most productive journals, which reported social media research during 2001–2014, accounted for 6.46% world share. A total of 266 were discovered as highly cited papers in social media research (0.57% world share), each was cited 100 or more times since publication till February 2015. Together these highly cited papers accounted 57462 citations, with an average of 216 citations per paper.

Keywords: Bibliometrics, publications, scientometrics, Social media, Social media networks, Social media sites