Research Progress and Development Trend of Social Media Big Data (SMBD): Knowledge Mapping Analysis Based on CiteSpace

TLDR: Web of Science core collection was taken as the data source, and traditional statistical methods and CiteSpace software were used to carry out the scientometrics analysis of SMBD, which showed the research status, hotspots and trends in this field.

Abstract: Social Media Big Data (SMBD) is widely used to serve the economic and social development of human beings. However, as a young research and practice field, the understanding of SMBD in academia is not enough and needs to be supplemented. This paper took Web of Science (WoS) core collection as the data source, and used traditional statistical methods and CiteSpace software to carry out the scientometrics analysis of SMBD, which showed the research status, hotspots and trends in this field. The results showed that: (1) More and more attention has been paid to SMBD research in academia, and the number of journals published has been increased in recent years, mainly in subjects such as Computer Science Engineering and Telecommunications. The results were published primarily in IEEE Access Sustainability and Future Generation Computer Systems the International Journal of eScience and so on; (2) In terms of contributions, China, the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries (regions) have published the most papers in SMBD, high-yield institutions also mainly from these countries (regions). There were already some excellent teams in the field, such as the Wanggen Wan team at Shanghai University and Haoran Xie team from City University of Hong Kong; (3) we studied the hotspots of SMBD in recent years, and realized the summary of the frontier of SMBD based on the keywords and co-citation literature, including the deep excavation and construction of social media technology, the reflection and concerns about the rapid development of social media, and the role of SMBD in solving human social development problems. These studies could provide values and references for SMBD researchers to understand the research status, hotspots and trends in this field.