Influencers and Social Media: State of the Art and Bibliometric Analysis

Abstract

The main objective of this paper is to show the state of the art of scientific studies on influencers in social media. For this purpose, we have extracted the documents from the Scopus databases (search results for “influencer*” and “social media” were 817) and examined them with the bibliographic analysis tool VOSviewer. The description of the documents claims a fast pace in the last year 2020 (41 % of all documents), the strong influence of the United States (29.5% of the documents) and the interesting interdisciplinarity between technical, scientific, and social subjects. The bibliometric analysis provided co-occurrences by keywords, with an increase in human and Instagram aspects, and co- authorships by nationalities with a strong Anglo-Saxon area of influence. In addition to the conclusions derived from the bibliometric analysis, digital citizenship education is claimed to critically address the impact of influencers on social networks.