Social Media Tools: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on Web of Science Data (2000-2023)

The concept of social media tools has gained the function of an umbrella concept by forming a word pool by shaping the action according to the subject and object, in a rich structure in terms of grammatical categories that regulate the relationship between the action and the participants in the event described in the action, and basically the relationship of the action with the participants in the event. The concept of social media tools and their use, which is used as a socio-economic element or content in many fields such as information technologies, education, communication, public relations, advertising, marketing, health, business, economy, finance and banking, politics, etc., has recently been the subject of many academic research and numerous studies in the literature. Due to the intricate and complex nature of the concept of social media tools, performing a bibliometric analysis of intertwined research topics will provide a panoramic perspective to researchers and organizations in different disciplines. The research aims to evaluate the status of the concept of social media tools in the international literature within the framework of descriptive analysis through document review method. For this purpose, after searching the Web of Science database and the necessary limitation procedures, a total of 26,283 published scientific studies published between 2000 and 2023 that include the concept of social media tools in their research, title or keywords or have the content of social media tools were accessed. A total of 26,283 scientific studies constituted the sample of the survey. A total of 26,283 scientific studies with social media tools content were analyzed with the VOS viewer program to determine the scientific categories and orientation of interest in the subject of social media tools, and the prominent country, organization, author and keyword concept units were reached with the publication-citation mapping technique. As a result of the research, it was determined that articles ranked first in terms of document type in social media tools research, and there has been a steady increase in the number of studies since 2013 in parallel with the widespread use of social media tools worldwide. Again, since the studies on social media tools are generally co-authored, the existence of a high level of collaboration index in the fields of survey draws attention.