Social Media Crowdsourcing a Co-Citation Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

Social media crowdsourcing has rapidly expanded into multitudes of academic spheres. This article aims to create an exhaustive bibliometric analysis of the expanding field of social media crowdsourcing with the objective of mapping the scholarly impact, thematic concentrations, and intellectual structure of already existing literature and their fields of research. A comprehensive analysis of the literature on crowdsourcing and social media was conducted using advanced statistical methodologies and tools such as Bibliometrix and Biblioshiny. The publications closely related to these topics were extracted from the Web of Science database, and co-author, co-word, and co-citation analyses were performed. These findings were then visualized graphically. The study highlights the most impactful sources, articles and their authors as well as the frequently used terms and their relatedness in order to examine the past, current and future trends, with the ultimate goal of finding unexplored or under-explored niches. The examination of various factors revealed significant research gaps in both the geographical and platform aspects. The geographic analysis shed light on areas where there is a lack of research, indicating potential for further exploration into the utilization of social media in crowdsourcing in the countries where it is yet to be explored. Additionally, the overreliance on Twitter as a social media platform has in a way constrained research opportunities and directions using local less popular, but potentially more efficient for the gathering of information in the respective field.