The State of Social Computing Research: A Literature Review and Synthesis using the Latent Semantic Analysis Approach

Social computing is an emerging research discipline. The number of publications on social computing has increased by 120% annually in the past four years. Despite the proliferation of studies in this area there is a lack of comprehensive, unified, and systematic characterization of this phenomenon. The definition and characterization of this phenomenon in the extant literature is diverse and fragmented. In this paper we attempt to bring some clarity by synthesizing and summarizing the extant literature in this area. We use Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a text mining and natural language processing technique, to summarize the state of social computing research. The results show that there are 27 unique dimensions which currently characterize this concept. LSA also reveals that, the 266 articles found in the literature predominantly focus on three major research themes namely, Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Sharing, and Content Management in the Social Computing context.