Progress and future directions for research on social media addiction: Visualization-based bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The proliferation of social media has drawn attention to social network addictions. Studies on social media addictions have been emerging across different fields, including psychology, behavioral science, and computer science. To investigate the evolution and development of the research on social media addiction (SMA), this paper constituted a bibliometric analysis of 396 articles published from 2011 to 2021. Through a cluster analysis of keywords, we identified five SMA research focuses: the influences of negative and dark personality traits (the dark triad); adolescents mental and physical health problems caused by fear of missing out; self-control under habit-driven addiction; excessive social media use induced by social anxiety; the health and behaviors in cross-addictions. We also find that the collaborative networks among authors and institutions were concentrated without significantly groupings, indicating the collaborative efficiency in SMA studies while the concentration may lead the research topics to converge. Our results show that researchers have built branches of theories to explain the prefactors of SMA, while most theories tend to pathologize SMA with personal prefactors. In the future, researchers need to find more factors other than personal characteristics in order to increase the connections of SMA research with the other fields. Researchers also need to discuss more user behaviors not motivated by social needs in order to keep up with the diversified developments of social media.