Social Media Addiction: A retrospective examination through bibliometric analysis

Purpose: The present bibliometric study aims to review the extant literature though a retrospective lens on social media addiction (SMA) research by identifying the existing body of research, and the future research areas. Design/methodology/approach: An extensive bibliometric analysis was administered on 581 articles extracted from SCOPUS database. Data was procured from Scopus by performing a keyword search of "Social Media Addiction". Biblioshiny software and VOS Viewer was used to organise, analyse and present the data. This study identifies majorly the thematic clusters and collaborations through science mapping further, most prolific authors, authors, documents, and their impacts were also examined through performance evaluation technique. Findings:The findings of the study are categorized in to two parts. The performance evaluation techniques identified the most relevant authors, cited documents, top sources and country collaborations while the science mapping technique reveals the thematic clusters based on co-occurrence of authors keywords, bibliographic coupling of sources and documents, co-citation network of the most cited author and the Sankey diagram. Research limitations/implications: In the current study the fragmented literature on social media addiction has been organized and structured to provide an overview of extant literature through an exhaustive bibliometric analysis. Further, themes which are identified gives a clear view about the research agendas for future researchers and has huge social implications. As the study utilized only the Scopus database so future research studies may be conducted using other databases also. Originality/value: This paper is unique in the sense that it is divergent from the previous studies which has only offered the empirical investigations in this area. The authors have tapped the methodological gap as this is the first attempt of its kind which has given valuable insights on the current state of research on social media addiction and guides for potential future agendas through bibliometric analysis