UNPACKING THE COMPLEX RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL MEDIA AND YOUTH MENTAL HEALTH: A BIBLIOMETRIC REVIEW

Abstract

This bibliometric study aimed to investigate the current state of research on the relationship between social media and youth mental health. The researchers analyzed publications from the Scopus database between 2012 and 2022 and examined trends in the number of publications, areas of contribution, contributing countries, influential institutions, and highly cited articles. To obtain comprehensive and reliable results, the researchers used various analytical tools, including exclusion criteria to refine the search, Microsoft Excel to calculate the frequency and percentage of published materials, OpenRefine software to standardize keywords, Harzing's Publish and Perish software to calculate citation metrics, and VOSviewer and WordArt tools to create bibliometric networks and visualizations. The study found that the majority of the 89 publications analyzed were from 2020 and 2022 and were mostly under the subject area of Medicine. The United States contributed the most publications, followed by the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands. The top four influential institutions with the same number of publications and percentage of 4.49% were Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, Universiteit Utrecht, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Melbourne. The top 20 highly cited articles covered various topics such as the relationship between social media use and psychiatric disorders and poor psychological functioning among children and adolescents. Overall, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on the relationship between social media and youth mental health. The study’s findings provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of research on the topic and offer insights for future studies.