Comparative Scientometric Analysis in Social Media: What Can We Learn? And What Is Next? - Information and Communication Technologies in Public Administration - page 101

administrations have not been examined. This absence of comprehensive sciento-
metric studies could mean that an interesting aspect of social media research has
remained unexamined, despite the fact that social media, in terms of the use of
information technology, has been studied from diverse standpoints. Therefore, it
would be interesting to analyze the research published in the main fields of knowl-
edge and thus acquire different perspectives of social media research. Taking into
account that the majority of published research in e-government corresponds to the
field of Public Administration, Information Science, and Communication, our first
research question is as follows:
RQ1: How many social media articles have been published in Journal Citation
Report (JCR) journals in the fields of Public Administration, Information
Science and Library Science, and Communication?
As noted above, scientometric projects seek to identify a discipline, structure
the information available, and highlight potential areas for future research. In
this regard, the analysis of the most commonly published questions in the field of
social media could inform researchers of the state of the art and highlight research
gaps. In other words, this analysis could be valuable as a tool guiding social media
research. Therefore, the following research question is proposed:
RQ2: What aspects of social media are most commonly addressed in published
research in the fields of Public Administration, Information Science and
Library Science, and Communication?
The existence and identity of a scientific domain are defined, to some degree, by
a set of academic journals (Paul, 2004). Discipline-specific outlets lay the founda-
tion, impact the evolution, and form directions for the development of a scholarly
domain (Serenko & Bontis, 2009). Journals allow researchers to directly com-
municate their ideas to a wider audience, become aware of recent developments,
learn about seminal works, accumulate references, and preserve the scientific body
of knowledge for the future generations of scholars and practitioners (Serenko &
Jiao, 2012). Therefore, in the field of e-government research, it could be interest-
ing to analyze the leading high-quality journals that include social media as one
of their areas of interest. Accordingly, the third research question addressed is as
follows:
RQ3: Which journals publish such papers most frequently?
It could be of interest to determine whether research aim influences the meth-
odology used to analyze the subject. If such an analysis were made, it could be of