Detection of online review spam: a literature review

Abstract

Online reviews have become an important resource for customers. It has become a habit for customers to first read a review before deciding to make a purchase. But it can be used by fraudsters to make review spam. This activity can result in the wrong customer purchase decision. Automatic opinion mining methods can also provide inaccurate conclusions due to this activity. This paper aims to provide a literature review on the online review spam detection topic. We identify papers relevant to related topics since 2015, understanding each paper to extract findings, similarities, and research gaps. We find that studies on this topic can be categorized into three focus groups. Focus on review spam detection methods, studies on individuals who write review spam, and studies that examine the spammer groups. Each focus of research has its strengths and weaknesses method which provide benefits in the field of review spam detection.