New Journal Article: “Recent Themes in Social Networking Service Research”

The following article was recently published by PLOS One.
Title
Recent Themes in Social Networking Service Research
Authors
John S. Liu
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Mei Hsiu-Ching Ho
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology
Louis Y. Y. Lu
Yuan Ze University, Chung-Li, Taoyuan, Taiwan
Source
PLoS ONE 12(1): e0170293
doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0170293
Abstract

The body of literature addressing the phenomenon related to social networking services (SNSs) has grown rather fast recently. Through a systematic and quantitative approach, this study identifies the recent SNS research themes, which are the issues discussed by a coherent and growing subset of this literature.
A set of academic articles retrieved from the Web of Science database is used as the basis for uncovering the recent themes. We begin the analysis by constructing a citation network which is further separated into groups after applying a widely used clustering method. The resulting clusters all consist of articles coherent in citation relationships.
This study suggests eight fast growing recent themes. They span widely encompassing politics, romantic relationships, public relations, journalism, and health. Among them, four focus their issues largely on Twitter, three on Facebook, and one generally on both. While discussions on traditional issues in SNSs such as personality, motivations, self-disclosure, narcissism, etc. continue to lead the pack, the proliferation of the highlighted recent themes in the near future is very likely to happen.

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