Analysis of Research on Online Rumors

Abstract

The prevalence of online rumors has now become a serious concern. They have also been attracting much scholarly attention from various academic disciplines. This study seeks to investigate the following research question: How do scholars tackle the phenomenon of online rumors? Specifically, it identifies (a) the research aims that have been explored, and (b) the disciplines as well as authors' collaboration trends in the exploration. For this purpose, the study conducts a content analysis of 202 scholarly articles to review the landscape of research on online rumors. The findings are as follows: There are four groups of research aims: (1) how rumors spread, (2) how rumors can be detected, (3) how rumors are perceived by humans, and (4) how rumors can be mitigated. In terms of the disciplines and authors' collaboration trends, while 128 (63.37%) articles showed intra-disciplinary collaboration, 74 (36.63%) articles involved inter-disciplinary collaboration trends. This study identifies directions for future research.