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 assess-ment 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 po-tential 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 la-belled. 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.