Innovation Diffusion Path And Academic Power Map Of Social Media Research

Based on the theory of "innovation and diffusion",this paper uses CiteSpace,a bibliometric visualization software,to conduct a visual analysis of the social media literature included in 17 journals of CSSCI of journalism and communication before January 2022,in order to reveal the diffusion law of social media research as new knowledge in China’s journalism and communication academia.In the time dimension,it analyzes the innovation and diffusion process of social media research: the diffusion stage,the changes of research topics and the evolution of knowledge structure in different stages;On the spatial dimension,the paper analyzes the discourse power pattern in the tangible field(the sending organization and the sending author)of social media research,and the empowerment mechanism in the intangible field(the co citation relationship),so as to obtain the academic power map of social media research.From the time dimension,social media research in China has experienced two periods:the initial period of diffusion from 1999 to 2011 and the take-off period of diffusion from2012 to 2021.At the initial stage of diffusion,the research topics were poor and lack of change,mainly focusing on the discussion of social media meta topics and the regression thinking of the theme of journalism and communication under the pressure of comparative advantage.The research on social media during the diffusion take-off period has opened the topic evolution based on practice orientation.AI,social robots,short videos,social media burnout and other topics will become important diffusion directions of social media research topics in the next few years.In terms of spatial dimension,the research authors’ cooperative relationship in social media research is dominated by the mode of knowledge production of fighting alone.In the existing cooperative relationship,the common research field based on geography and industry has become an important starting point for building a cooperative network.The Matthew effect of the number of articles published by authors is obvious.A small number of core author groups grasp the substantial knowledge flow of social media research in top journals,and there is a certain discourse power pattern.In the geo industry academic community in the tangible field,a "Dan" type cooperation network has been basically established with the School of Journalism of Renmin University of China as the center.The journalism and communication schools of various universities are the main force in this field,with a high concentration of industries.In addition,the map of sending agencies also has the following spatial characteristics: First,the cooperation network between agencies has obvious regional characteristics,and the research center is mainly concentrated in Beijing.Second,in addition to the cooperation among institutions,the institutions that actively send documents also form a relatively complete network of cooperation among themselves.Third,the employment destination of important research scholars may create cooperation opportunities between different research institutions and form a chain flow path of knowledge.Combining time and space to explore the diffusion mechanism of academic power in social media research,it is found that scholars who are empowered by being frequently cited literature influence the trend of social media research topics with the power of "being seen",represented by Peng Lan.Gao cited scholars,represented by Peng Lan,Yu Guoming,and Chen Lidan,played the role of early adopters,and early followers were played by scholars Sun Wei,Chang Jiang and others.Among them,the diffusion logic of academic power is for early adopters to promote the propagation of academic power towards the complex network structure of multi-node concentric circles by building the underlying knowledge and perspective framework in the field of social media research.