Social media usage in academic research

Abstract

Recently researchers have used “conversation prism” and “social media prisma”, to consolidate social medias with respect to their use. Although both identified 25 types, having average five examples each, they did not identify contribution of each type in academic research. Moreover some of mentioned social services had been suspended or changed. In this paper we attempt to access each social media mentioned in conversation prism in order to first, identify services that are operational to date, services which have suspended and those which have changed during course of time. Second, we compare number of publications associated with each social media, in order to identify which social media has contributed most to academic research. Third, we attempt to find correlation between number of publications and development tools provided by respective social applications. Fourth, social medias are ranked with respect to number of times other social medias share content with respective social application. It was found that out of 168 social applications, 10% changed their service objective while 13% were suspended. Among all social application, AMAZON had highest i.e. 147,000 number of citations on Google scholar whereas 90.7% of total citations were contributed by top 30 social medias. For developers, 22 out of top 30 social medias provided developer options in form of either application programming interface (API) or software development kits (SDK) and Facebook was found to be most cross referred social media based on content sharing. Finally conclusion and future work of study is presented.