Elephant in the Room: Dissecting and Reflecting on the Evolution of Online Social Network Research
Luca Pajola, Saskia Laura Schr\"oer, Pier Paolo Tricomi, Mauro Conti, Giovanni Apruzzese

TL;DR
This paper offers a comprehensive review of online social network research, analyzing over 13,000 papers, revealing trends and challenges, and proposing future directions through expert insights to enhance data accessibility and research impact.
Contribution
It introduces the Minerva-OSN dataset, the first comprehensive collection of OSN research metadata, and provides a holistic analysis and expert recommendations to advance the field.
Findings
Predominant focus on Twitter in OSN research
Difficulty in obtaining OSN data hampers research progress
Expert suggestions emphasize increased collaboration with OSN owners
Abstract
Billions of individuals engage with Online Social Networks (OSN) daily. The owners of OSN try to meet the demands of their end-users while complying with business necessities. Such necessities may, however, lead to the adoption of restrictive data access policies that hinder research activities from "external" scientists -- who may, in turn, resort to other means (e.g., rely on static datasets) for their studies. Given the abundance of literature on OSN, we -- as academics -- should take a step back and reflect on what we have done so far, after having written thousands of papers on OSN. This is the first paper that provides a holistic outlook to the entire body of research that focused on OSN -- since the seminal work by Acquisti and Gross (2006). First, we search through over 1 million peer-reviewed publications, and derive 13,842 papers that focus on OSN: we organize the metadata of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsSocial Media and Politics
