Social Media Recommender Systems (SMRS): A Bibliometric Analysis Study 2000–2021

The increasing popularity of social media resources such as blogs, bookmarks, chatrooms, forums and video portals in recent years has attracted diverse users. Following the rise of the Internet, online content has become overloaded, prompting the introduction of recommender systems on social media. As a result, research on the dynamic growth of recommender systems in social media has gained significant traction since the year 2000. Social media recommender systems (SMRS) utilize multiple recommendation fields such as item, user, location, tag, event, tour and game in searching for preferred recommended information. Thus, young research fellows, academic scholars and practitioners must understand the need for SMRS to be complemented with recommendation fields. This requirement underlines the significance of a bibliometric analysis that focuses on social media based on existing publications. Hence, using the Web of Science (WoS) database, this study aimed to gather statistical information on SMRS to help researchers acquire an extensive understanding of such systems. The analysis was conducted by identifying SMRS-related publications and scientometric indicators to assess the growth rate, including the relative growth rate (RGR), doubling time (DT) and the field-normalized citation score (NCSf)—for citation analysis. Overall, this bibliometric study provides relevant measures for comparing and improving the citation rate of publications for new researchers.