Comparative Scientometric Analysis in Social Media: What Can We Learn? And What Is Next? - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 98

fundamentally altered how we interact and maintain our social relations in a soci-
ety (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). In addition, the growing participation of citizens
in social networking sites is altering the nature of social relations (Christofides,
Muise, & Desmarais, 2009; Li, 2011), changing the nature of political and public
dialogue (Osimo, 2008). Therefore, this chapter is focused on analyzing social
media as a new means of communication between public administrations and the
citizenry.
Continuing interest in the question is reflected in the large number of studies
published in this respect in the last years. It draws upon various reference disciplines,
including Public Administration, Information Science, and Communication. Since
its appearance, social media researchers in public administration have analyzed
mainly the usefulness of social media for different purposes such as political cam-
paigns (Aparaschivei, 2011; Williams & Gulati, 2013), disclosure of a greater vol-
ume of information to a wider range of citizens (Bonsón, Torres, Royo, & Flores,
2012), and citizen coproduction initiatives (Linders, 2012). The first two aspects
concern the transparency and visibility of local government actions, whereas the
second, in addition, favors more participative management (Kovac & Decman,
2009).
Other researchers have explored the past, present, and future development of
social media (Boyd & Ellison, 2007) to create a theoretical support for the disci-
pline (Sidorova, Evangelopoulos, Valacich, & Ramakrishnan, 2008). Nevertheless,
a systematic, unifying approach has yet to be achieved, and without this, no new
theoretical arguments can be created nor concepts and categories provided to help
us understand the social media phenomenon in public administrations.
To understand the construction of theoretical support underpinning the ques-
tion of social media, it is of critical importance to explore its intellectual core,
by analyzing the cumulative body of knowledge rather than looking at individual
works (Holsapple, 2008). Therefore, comprehensive reviews are needed to integrate
contributions and to provide a critical outlook on work in this field, to improve our
understanding of e-government, and to gain a broad view of the current situation
and of possibilities for future research. For this purpose, we propose a descriptive
scientometric methodology (Neufeld, Fang, & Huff, 2007) that has been compre-
hensively tested in the field of information science (Cocosila, Serenko, & Turel,
2011; Waltman, Yan, & Van Eck, 2011). This specific approach has been used,
among other reasons, as an attempt to understand the identity of a scientific disci-
pline in a particular academic area (Straub, 2006). In this chapter, the underlying
assumption of our approach is that the theoretical framework of a scholarly disci-
pline is built upon the high-quality body of knowledge published in the leading
channels established for this purpose. Nevertheless, to date, prior research has not
analyzed this item in the social media field of knowledge.
To fill this gap, the objective of this chapter is to analyze the research into
the field of social media implementation in public administrations, examining the
theories that support the use of social media, the main use of this technology for