Beyond Disciplinary Boundaries: Mapping Educational Science in the Discourse on Social Media

Abstract

Social media has attracted considerable scholarly interest. Previous research has demonstrated the need for a more comprehensive overview of social media research across diverse disciplines. However, there is a lack of research that identifies the scope of social media integration across educational settings and how it relates to research in other academic disciplines. Harnessing the search terms of previous literature reviews, this study collected data on 80,267 articles from the Web of Science Core Collection database using search terms that were based on previous literature reviews. The data were analyzed using a combination of co-citation and bibliometric analyses via a mixed-methods approach. Our results show that there has been a constant increase in the number of publications concerned with social media, both as a transversal topic and within the educational sector. We are also able to show a range of topical domains in which the vast majority of research on social media is conducted. Our findings have practical implications for scholars and practitioners alike. Scholars can benefit from these types of analyses to identify authors and topic clusters that might otherwise have been unrecognized. Similarly, practitioners can benefit from this overview of the current “state-of-the-art” on social media.

A systematic review of social media as a teaching and learning tool in higher education: A theoretical grounding perspective

“…The central aim was to document research trends, dominant terms, and the main characteristics of studies, with a focus on providing a new perspective on the theoretical groundings that may explain the pedagogical integration of social media within higher education teaching and learning. These results extend the findings of other systematic literature reviews regarding social media use in education-conducted on single or multiple platforms (Lopes et al, 2017;Manca, 2020;Tang & Hew, 2017)-and across various disciplinary fields (Barrot, 2021a;Rehm et al, 2019). The main finding indicates a shift from studies focused on Facebook, as the most researched social media platform and its use by students for informal learning, to a more recent trend from 2018 onwards showing studies still focused on attitudes, intentions, and satisfaction of social media as a teaching and learning tool.…”

“…The increasing number of systematic reviews related to the use of social media in education highlights the importance of these reviews in shaping educational research, identifying future research directions, and bridging the research-practice divide (Chong et al, 2022). Scholars have adopted several approaches to systematic reviews of scientific literature: (1) qualitative synthesis (e.g., Manca, 2020;Niu, 2019); (ii) meta-analysis (also known as quantitative synthesis) (e.g., Al-Qaysi et al, 2020;Mnkandla & Minnaar, 2017); (iii) qualitative and quantitative synthesis (e.g., Greenhow & Askari, 2017;Manca & Ranieri, 2013, 2016bManca et al, 2021;Tang & Hew, 2017); (iv) bibliometric analysis (e.g., Barrot, 2021a;Lopes et al, 2017;Rehm et al, 2019); and most recently (v) mixed methods approach using bibliometric analysis and qualitative analysis (e.g., Barrot, 2021b).…”

“…Despite the increasing level of interest and the growing body of empirical research on specific uses of social media (Alshalawi, 2022;Manca & Ranieri, 2016c;Sobaih et al, 2016), very few studies have been conducted to systematically examine how academics are utilizing social media within their teaching engagements and have mapped the use of social media in education across the various disciplinary fields (Barrot, 2021a;Rehm et al, 2019).…”

Professional development for STEM educators: A bibliometric analysis of the recent progress

“…The bibliometric analysis approach enables the comprehensive exploration of various dimensions of a massive amount of bibliographic data in an objective and reliable manner from an international perspective (Aria & Cuccurullo, 2017; Rehm et al, 2019). It presents the results through various perspectives, such as citation, co‐citation, spatial and lexical networks, among others, to identify emerging trends and patterns in scholarly communication.…”

YouTube como ciberaula. Revisión crítica de su uso pedagógico en la Universidad Iberoamericana

“…En este sentido, y en el caso de las redes sociales, diversos estudios han mostrado que pueden generar ambientes de aprendizaje sostenibles, desdibujando barreras de espacio y tiempo (Coll, 2013;Fonseca Peso et al, 2020;Osatuyi et al, 2018) y configurando modos de uso de esta información digital en la vida diaria, como el 'crear-compartir' (Ellison y Boyd, 2013), la mezcla de información y recursos procedentes de varios canales y lugares (Expósito et al, 2020;Ramires Lima et al, 2020;Rehm et al, 2019), la innovación en las formas de enseñanza-aprendizaje por medio de interacciones periféricas y emergentes Greenhow y Chapman, 2020) y la total amplificación del contexto socio pedagógico (Sánchez-Aguilar y Esparza-Puga, 2020; Gallego y Murillo, 2018;Maraza-Quispe et al, 2020).…”