Mapping development of social media research through different disciplines: Collaborative learning in management and computer science

Social media is bringing great challenges and wonderful opportunities for companies which attract both many managers and quite large number of researchers in recent years. However, current studies on social media has not been depicted well by combining work of both researchers in management study and ones in computer science study. Using CiteSpace II, this paper empirically mapped important references that lead trends of social media development, authors contributing greatly to this field and hot topics of all the social media articles. The way that social media study developed was analyzed according to the visualization of references and topics of social media, with support of empirical data from Web of Science. General characters of published articles from top journals and top conferences were given out to show status of social media study now. Furthermore, the two most important groups - topics from management study and those from computer science study were studied respectively to compare their development in order to show the fusion, the separation and other relationship of the two most important branches of social media. Then we debate Collaborative Learning (CL) as an emerging hot topic both in management and computer science under the environment of social media. Finally, hottest trends and topics in these years and recent future were discussed to provide help for future work.