Investigatory Trends in Emerging Facebook Research: Implications for Communication Scholarship

Since the advent of Facebook, researchers across academic disciplines have examined the nature and scope of scholarship regarding this SNS. Based on a content analysis approach, Piotrowski (2012) reported that many popular issues in the media on the topic of Facebook are largely ignored by research investigators. Due to the proliferation of studies on SNS, the current investigation aims to update, via a replication design, Piotrowski's earlier findings. To that end, this study involved a topical content analysis of published articles on the specific topic of Facebook indexed in the PsycINFO database (2012-2016). This dataset included 842 references. In rank order, the major topical areas of research interest regarding Facebook were found to be: health/mental health management, interpersonal relationships, advertising/marketing, personality factors, educational adaptations, theory-models, user motivations, informal academic usage by students, social dynamics, self-disclosure, Facebook profiles, and problematic overuse/addiction. Since Piotrowski's (2012) earlier analysis, this update confirms major strides in research attention devoted to 2 key areas, i.e., health monitoring and marketing-advertising topics. Despite considerable media interest in technology issues such as privacy, news feeds, and social 'movements', the current analysis found these areas garner sparse research attention by Facebook scholars. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for the communication field. While, overall, the emerging literature in this area appears to be bourgeoning, further bibliometric study, across academic disciplines, is needed in order to elucidate the domain structure of scholarship of Facebook research.