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Top1. Introduction
With the evolution and easy access to the Internet, the number of social network users is rising significantly. Social media has improved online communication and nearly 3.2 billion people use it1. Through social media (SM), users can interact, communicate, and exchange information with each other through these websites and applications. Moreover, social media provides new source of information (actually a goldmine of information) and it has become “what is-happening-right-now” tools that enable interested parties to follow individual users’ thoughts and commentary on real-time events, participate in activities and live events, follow breaking news and keep up with friends and families (Mustafa et al., 2017). It is changing the public discourse and setting trends and agendas in topics that range from the environment and politics to technology and the entertainment industry. Social media users are being followed or follow other users for knowledge seeking, knowledge acquisition and knowledge dissemination (Assaad & Gomez, 2011; Wang & Wang, 2018) and this falls under the definition of Knowledge Management (KM).
The knowledge discovery in SM has been focused by different researchers in different domains. Prior studies explored significant role of SM in sentiment analysis (Ostrowski, 2010), message clustering (Mehmood, Maurer, & Afzal, 2013), political findings (Weeks, Ardèvol-Abreu, & Gil de Zúñiga, 2015), health care awareness (Roselina, Rahmawati, Mardiati, & Lusia, 2018) and emergency risk communication (Yuan & Liu, 2018). Moreover these publications are used in academic writing and they are heavily cited too and top ten most cited studies are mentioned in the Appendix. According to these studies findings, SM role has been established with knowledge management (KM) significantly, therefore it has become essential to explore specific research themes of SM publications related to KM. Therefore we conducted a bibliometric analysis of 234 SM publications (see methodology) which have substantial link with KM to find out explicit SM KM research themes in this study.
Besides, there are two other motivations to conduct this bibliometric study. First, Kapoor et al. (2018) conducted a bibliometric study of 12000 SM publications between 1997-2017 using VOSviewer. They found seven major themes through author co-citation analysis and five themes through text analysis. This study also indicated that almost all publications related to knowledge sharing during natural disasters and critical events focus only on SM data (Kapoor et al., 2018, p. 24). This sparked our interest to determine the sole contribution of SM publications in KM research academia to explore its significant and vital role in different sectors of life. Second, previous SM studies also conducted a bibliometric analysis of specific research areas. For example, bibliometric of event detection (Chen et al., 2019), social media trends in psychology (Zyoud et al., 2018) and the role of SM in innovation research (Appio et al., 2016). However, there is scarcest SM bibliometric study that provides a complete and comprehensive overview related KM.