Online Social Networks Analysis - a Bibliometric Approach

Since the appearance and mass adoption of the Web 2.0 technologies, the online social networks (OSN) have become an important part of our every-day life. In the scientific literature, over the years, many paper have deal with the problems that may arise due to the OSN, such as: privacy issues, disclosure, behaviours, addiction, social capital, social activity, social action and learning. On the contrary, other papers have focused on more practical applications, bringing benefits to the economic activity or to individuals. Therefore, firm's reputation, viral marketing, financial performance changes, etc. have been studied in the OSN context. Even though the number of such papers is a large one, the field still lacks in the existence of a global overview over the OSN area in bibliometric terms. The bibliometric analysis is one of the most common used technique when dealing with the evolution of a specific field, offering a global overview over it. For this, the present paper, consider the publications written on the OSN field until February 2015 and present them in bibliometric terms, using the Web of Science (WoS) database.