Abstract
Twitter has been one of the most popular social network sites for academic research; the main objective of this study was to update the current knowledge boundary surrounding Twitter-related investigations and, further, identify the major research topics and analyze their evolution across time. A bibliometric analysis has been applied in this article: we retrieved 19,205 Twitter-related academic articles from Web of Science after several steps of data cleaning and preparation. The R package “Bibliometrix” was mainly used in analyzing this content. Our study has two sections, and performance analysis contains 5 categories (Annual Scientific Production, Most Relevant Sources, Most Productive Authors, Most Cited Publications, Most Relevant Keywords.). The science mapping included country collaboration analysis and thematic analysis. We highlight our thematic analysis by splitting the whole bibliographic dataset into three temporal periods, thus a thematic evolution across time has been presented. This study is one of the most comprehensive bibliometric overview in analyzing Twitter-related studies by far. We proceed to explain how the results will benefit the understanding of current academic research interests on the social media giant.
Highlights
With more than ten years of prosperity and development, Twitter possesses 330 million monthly active users that send about 500 million tweets per day [1]
Previous reports [2,3] indicated that Twitter was losing its users, but statistics show that the trend of active users in this social network platform is still relatively positive [4]
Data from diverse social network platforms is being used by researchers to develop “a better understanding of how people are using social media in specific circumstances” [5]
Summary
With more than ten years of prosperity and development, Twitter possesses 330 million monthly active users that send about 500 million tweets per day [1]. Previous reports [2,3] indicated that Twitter was losing its users, but statistics show that the trend of active users in this social network platform is still relatively positive [4]. Under the global tendency of using Twitter as a daily communication and information tool [6], scientific research about this social network platform has maintained a high growth rate year by year [7]. Twitter data, compared with other digital platforms (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.), is more accessible and can contain valuable resources for academic research; besides, the wide range of data-retrieving method options makes Twitter one of the most studied objects in the social sciences [5,8]. Gupta et al [7] quantitatively ranked 4709 Twitter-related studies by various categories, including annual global publication, geographic distribution, subject distribution, top keywords, top productive institutions, top authors etc
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