Mapping the Landscape of Social Media Literacy Research: A Bibliometric Analysis of Scopus-Indexed Publications (2005–2026)

Abstract

Social media literacy has emerged as a distinct construct in understanding how individuals navigate misinformation, algorithmic content curation, and platform-mediated social life. Studies on this topic have grown rapidly. However, existing bibliometric work has addressed the broader construct of digital media literacy rather than social media literacy specifically, leaving the latter's intellectual structure unmapped. This study addresses that gap through a bibliometric analysis of 215 Scopus-indexed documents published between 2010 and 2026. Data were retrieved through exact-phrase matching on the Title, Abstract, and Keywords fields and refined using explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria and a documented screening procedure. VOSviewer was used to construct keyword co-occurrence and country co-authorship networks with temporal overlays. The field records a compound annual growth rate of 28.9% between 2010 and 2025, with 72.1% of all output published from 2020 onward. Twenty-five countries met the three-document threshold. The United States leads output with 61 documents, yet records an average normalised citation score of 0.99, at the world average, while Belgium (3.14), Nigeria (2.74), and China (2.31) achieve higher normalised impact from smaller outputs. Malaysia ranks third with 16 documents and collaborates almost exclusively with Global South partners. Keyword co-occurrence analysis identified six thematic clusters, of which the two largest concern conceptual foundations and adolescent well-being. Contrary to the prominence of misinformation in public discourse, the intellectual centre of the field is adolescent psychosocial outcomes, appearance and well-being themes together account for 152 of 365 keyword occurrences. Temporal analysis shows movement from pedagogy-focused research before 2020 toward population- and outcome-focused research from 2023, with algorithmic literacy recording the most recent average publication year (2025.0) despite appearing in only three documents.