Elephant in the Room: Dissecting and Reflecting on the Evolution of Online Social Network Research
Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Study design: Systematic Review
Abstract: Billions of individuals engage with Online Social Networks (OSN) daily. The owners of OSN try to meet the demands of their end-users while complying with business necessities. Such necessities may, however, lead to the adoption of restrictive data access policies that hinder research activities from "external"' scientists---who may, in turn, resort to other means (e.g., rely on static datasets) for their studies. Given the abundance of literature on OSN, we - as academics - should take a step back and reflect on what we have done so far, after having written thousands of papers on OSN. This is the first paper that provides a holistic outlook to the entire body of research that focused on OSN - since the seminal work by Acquisti and Gross (2006). First, we search through over 1 million peer-reviewed publications, and derive 13,842 papers that focus on OSN: we organize the metadata of these works in the Minerva-OSN dataset, the first of its kind - which we publicly release. Next, by analyzing Minerva-OSN, we provide factual evidence elucidating trends and aspects that deserve to be brought to light - such as the predominant focus on Twitter or the difficulty in obtaining OSN data. Finally, as a constructive step to guide future research, we carry out an expert survey (n=50) with established scientists in this field, and coalesce suggestions to improve the status quo - such as an increased involvement of OSN owners. Our findings should inspire a reflection to "rescue" research on OSN. Doing so would improve the overall OSN ecosystem, benefiting both their owners and end-users - and, hence, our society.
Institutions: University of Padua, University of Liechtenstein
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411120959