Unveiling the intellectual origins of Social Media-based innovation: insights from a bibliometric approach

This article uses a bundle of bibliometric and text-mining techniques to provide a systematic assessment of the intellectual core of the Social Media-based innovation research field. The goal of this study is to identify main research areas, understand the current state of development and suggest potential future directions by analysing co-citations from 155 papers published between 2003 and 2013 in the most influential academic journals. The main clusters have been identified, mapped, and labelled. Their most active areas on this topic and the most influential and co-cited papers have been identified and described. Also, intra- and inter-cluster knowledge base diversity has been assessed by using indicators stemming from the domains of Information Theory and Biology. A t test has been performed to assess the significance of the inter-cluster diversity. Five co-existing research streams shaping the research field under investigation have been identified and characterized.