Global trends in research related to social media in psychology: mapping and bibliometric analysis

BACKGROUND: Social media, defined as interactive Web applications, have been on the rise globally, particularly among adults. The objective of this study was to investigate the trend of the literature related to the most used social network worldwide (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, and Instagram) in the field of psychology. Specifically, this study will assess the growth in publications, citation analysis, international collaboration, author productivity, emerging topics and the mapping of frequent terms in publications pertaining to social media in the field of psychology. METHODS: Publications related to social media in the field of psychology published between 2004 and 2014 were obtained from the Web of Science. The records extracted were analysed for bibliometric characteristics such as the growth in publications, citation analysis, international collaboration, emerging topics and the mapping of frequent terms in publications pertaining to social media in the field of psychology. VOSviewer v.1.6.5 was used to construct scientific maps. RESULTS: ranked first in terms of the total publications (n = 39). A visualisation analysis showed that personality psychology, experimental psychology, psychological risk factors, and developmental psychology were continual concerns of the research. CONCLUSIONS: This is the first study reporting the global trends in the research related to social media in the psychology field. Based on the raw data from the Web of Science, publication characteristics such as quality and quantity were assessed using bibliometric techniques over 12 years. The USA and its institutions play a dominant role in this topic. The most preferred topics related to social media in psychology are personality psychology, experimental psychology, psychological risk factors, and developmental psychology.