Sosyal Medya Araştırmalarının Konusal Analizi ve Haritalandırılması (2000-2020)

Abstract

Social media applications allow individuals to communicate with each other and share ideas and thoughts interactively regardless of time and space. These platforms, which have found a place in almost every aspect of life, affect individuals and societies and are also rapidly changing. The growing popularity of these platforms has made them attractive as research subjects across multiple disciplines in academic studies. It has also been observed that the number of studies on social media has been increasing over time. Within the scope of this study, it is aimed to determine which disciplines are prominent in research on social media and to identify interdisciplinary similarities or differences and potential study topics. For this purpose, the Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection was searched with the identified keywords, and studies on social media published between 2000 and 2020 were detected. After the data cleaning process, the final dataset consisted of 88,717 records. In this context, the keywords used in social media-related publications in journals indexed in different WoS categories were mapped using VOSviewer. As a result, it was found that the number of publications on the subject started to increase significantly after 2010, the highest number of publications was in the Computer Science research area (34.4%), and the recently prominent keywords were shaped within the framework of data science methods and applications such as sentiment analysis, machine learning, and natural language processing. It is also understood from the findings that there have been studies focusing on the analysis of user preferences and opinions in recent years. Furthermore, the keywords with the highest total link strength were identified by the WoS categories and their rankings were compared with the Spearman correlation test. The results showed that Technology, Social Sciences, and Life Sciences and Biomedicine categories are similar in terms of these keywords, while the Physical Sciences differ from the others. The findings of the study also revealed that within the Social Sciences category, Information Science and Library Science research area is ranked 10th in terms of the number of publications related to social media, while in the Technology category, it holds the third rank. It is thought that some keywords highlighted in the study can give researchers who are interested in the subject an idea about changing research orientations, potential research topics related to social media, and potential partnerships that can be established with different disciplines.