Social Software and Knowledge Sharing: A Systematic Literature Review

Some researchers have linked the social software usage like social media, wikis, blogs, instant messaging, forums and corporate social networks with the process of knowledge sharing. They also found that the application of social software that can provide positive results in the knowledge sharing process. The purpose of this research is to provide insights into state-of-the-art research on the use of social software to support the knowledge sharing process. This research is conducted to answer (i) how the general description of the knowledge sharing process is and (ii) how social software helps the process of knowledge sharing. The method used in this research is the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) where synthesizing related papers sourced from the ScienceDirect journal database. Searching related papers using certain keywords obtained 865 papers. Then 85 papers were selected after applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria. Following a more rigorous papers quality assessment, 20 papers are selected for further analyses. Based on the analysis, we found a general description of knowledge sharing. This paper also describes how social software can support the process of sharing knowledge, and some influencing factors. That factors influencing the level of orientation and knowledge sharing activities on social media, and divided into individual and social factors. Besides that, there are several other factors related but have not been clearly classified yet. Also, we found Social Networking Sites (SNS) as the type of social software that often used and this topic frequently discussed in organization scope.