Global research performance on social media security: a bibliometric visualization analysis

Purpose This study concentrates on assessing the research productivity in the domain of social media security in the past decades. The purpose of this study is to conduct a comprehensive bibliometric review on social media using various bibliometric indicators. Design/methodology/approach A total of 8,121 scientific publications were retrieved from Scopus database from period 1998 to 2021 using associated keyword search. This study also used VOSviewer© tool to evaluate the network visualisation. Findings The result of this study revealed that there is a steady growth of annual publications except for the years 2015 and 2016. A total of 8,121 scientific publications and 80,454 total citations were found with 11.2 average citations per publication. The USA, China and India were top productive countries in terms of publishing research in the field; Chinese Academy of Sciences secured top position with 126 publications in highly productive organisation in the domain. The lecture notes in computer science from Springer Nature received a highly produced title with 553 publications and 4,453 total citations. For co-occurrence of author’s keywords, network visualisation analysis revealed that “Social Media”, “Social Network”, “Security”, “Privacy” and “Trust” found maximum occurrence in the domain of social media security. Research limitations/implications This study provides comprehensive research status of social media security by performing a bibliometric analysis. The findings of this study will help relevant researchers to understand the research trend, pursue scientific collaborators and enhance research topic preferences. Originality/value The rareness of this study, detailed bibliometric analysis on the domain of social media security, is proven using numerous bibliometric indicators and application of VOSviewer in the domain.