Aims & Scope

 

Journal of Social Media Research (JSOMER) is an international, interdisciplinary, double-blind peer-reviewed, open-access journal dedicated to advancing rigorous and ethically responsible research on social media.

JSOMER provides a scholarly forum for research at the intersection of the social sciences, behavioural sciences, humanities, education, communication, health and medical sciences, natural sciences, engineering, and computational sciences. The journal examines social media as a technological, communicative, behavioural, psychological, educational, cultural, economic, medical, scientific, and societal phenomenon.

The journal welcomes research investigating how social media platforms, users, content, technologies, algorithms, communities, and institutions interact with individuals, populations, organizations, the natural environment, and society. Irrespective of disciplinary origin, social media must constitute a substantive component of the research question, theoretical framework, methodology, data, or interpretation of findings.

Aims

JSOMER aims to:

  • advance theoretical, empirical, clinical, methodological, and interdisciplinary knowledge concerning social media;
  • provide an international forum for research on the individual, public, institutional, technological, medical, scientific, environmental, and societal implications of social media;
  • promote methodologically rigorous, transparent, reproducible, and ethically responsible scholarship;
  • encourage meaningful dialogue among the social, behavioural, educational, communication, health, medical, natural, engineering, and computational sciences;
  • support research addressing emerging developments in digital platforms, artificial intelligence, online behaviour, health communication, science communication, and platform governance;
  • facilitate the responsible application of quantitative, qualitative, experimental, clinical, computational, and mixed-method research approaches to social media;
  • contribute evidence that may inform education, clinical practice, public health, science communication, technology development, policy, and professional practice; and
  • improve the international accessibility and visibility of high-quality social media research.

Scope

JSOMER considers manuscripts addressing social media in relation to one or more of the following areas.

Social, behavioral, and psychological dimensions

  • social media use, engagement, participation, and user behavior;
  • psychological well-being, mental health, and problematic social media use;
  • online identity, self-presentation, social comparison, and interpersonal relationships;
  • childhood, adolescence, adulthood, aging, and family life;
  • digital parenting and sharenting;
  • cyberbullying, online harassment, hate speech, and harmful online behavior;
  • social influence, group processes, social support, and online communities;
  • inequality, accessibility, inclusion, and the societal consequences of social media; and
  • cultural differences in social media use and its outcomes.

Communication, culture, education, and society

  • digital communication and computer-mediated interaction;
  • journalism, news consumption, and changing media environments;
  • misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, and information credibility;
  • political communication, civic participation, activism, and public opinion;
  • digital culture, popular culture, visual communication, and online communities;
  • education, teaching, learning, and digital literacy;
  • marketing, consumer behavior, influencers, and electronic word of mouth;
  • organizational communication and professional uses of social media;
  • crisis, risk, and emergency communication; and
  • social media regulation, moderation, policy, and platform accountability.

Health and medical sciences

  • social media and mental or psychosocial health;
  • health communication and public-health communication;
  • social media use by patients, healthcare professionals, caregivers, and health organizations;
  • online health information, health literacy, and health-related misinformation;
  • health promotion, disease prevention, and behavior-change interventions delivered or supported through social media;
  • digital epidemiology, infodemiology, public-health surveillance, and population-level social media data;
  • social media use in medicine, psychiatry, psychology, nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, nutrition, rehabilitation, and allied health disciplines;
  • patient experiences, peer-support communities, professional communication, and clinical education on social media;
  • ethical, legal, privacy, and safety issues arising from the use of social media in health-related contexts; and
  • associations between social media use and physical, psychological, behavioral, or clinical outcomes.

Health and medical manuscripts do not necessarily need to be clinical studies. However, they must demonstrate an explicit connection between social media and a health, medical, behavioral, professional, or population-level research question.

Natural and environmental sciences

  • public communication and public understanding of science through social media;
  • environmental communication and environmental behavior;
  • climate-change communication, engagement, misinformation, and public response;
  • communication concerning natural hazards, disasters, emergencies, and environmental risks;
  • social media use in citizen science and public participation in scientific research;
  • online dissemination of scientific evidence and interaction between scientists and the public;
  • public perceptions of scientific developments, emerging technologies, and environmental issues;
  • social media data used to examine human responses to environmental events;
  • communication relating to sustainability, conservation, biodiversity, energy, agriculture, and food systems; and
  • the ethical and methodological implications of using social media data in scientific and environmental research.

Submissions from the natural sciences should establish a substantive connection between social media and science communication, public engagement, human behavior, environmental response, citizen science, risk communication, or another clearly defined social media research problem. Manuscripts reporting only laboratory, field, or technical findings without a meaningful social media component fall outside the journal’s scope.

Technology, artificial intelligence, and computational research

  • computational social science and social media analytics;
  • social network analysis, big-data research, and digital research methods;
  • artificial intelligence and machine learning in social media research;
  • algorithms, recommender systems, personalization, and platform governance;
  • automated content analysis, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and multimodal analysis;
  • bots, synthetic media, deepfakes, and coordinated online behaviour;
  • human-computer interaction and user experience in social media environments;
  • social media data collection, measurement, validation, and reproducibility;
  • privacy, surveillance, data protection, cybersecurity, and digital ethics; and
  • the design and evaluation of technological systems intended to understand or improve social media experiences.

Technical and engineering studies are considered when they provide a clear contribution to understanding social media content, communication, users, behavior, communities, platforms, governance, health, science, or societal outcomes. Manuscripts presenting only the performance of an algorithm, model, software application, or engineering system without substantive relevance to social media research are outside the journal’s scope.

Interdisciplinary orientation

JSOMER welcomes studies originating from any academic discipline, including but not limited to communication, psychology, sociology, education, media studies, cultural studies, business, economics, political science, public health, medicine, psychiatry, nursing, information science, computer science, engineering, environmental science, and other natural or applied sciences.

The journal’s interdisciplinary orientation does not mean that every manuscript must combine multiple disciplines. A high-quality study grounded in a single discipline may be considered, provided that social media is central to the study and that the manuscript makes a clear theoretical, empirical, clinical, methodological, technological, or practical contribution.

Types of manuscripts

JSOMER considers the following types of scholarly contributions:

  • original research articles;
  • systematic reviews;
  • scoping reviews;
  • meta-analyses;
  • theoretical and conceptual articles;
  • methodological articles;
  • brief research reports; and
  • book reviews relevant to the journal’s scope.

The journal welcomes quantitative, qualitative, mixed-methods, experimental, observational, clinical, epidemiological, longitudinal, cross-sectional, computational, network-analytic, and evidence-synthesis approaches.

Manuscripts are evaluated according to:

  • relevance to the journal’s aims and scope;
  • originality and significance of the scholarly contribution;
  • appropriateness and transparency of the methodology;
  • ethical compliance;
  • clarity of reporting;
  • correspondence between the evidence and the conclusions;
  • engagement with relevant international literature; and
  • potential value to researchers, practitioners, policymakers, or other relevant audiences.

Out-of-scope submissions

JSOMER does not normally consider:

  • manuscripts in which social media is incidental or peripheral to the research question;
  • general studies of internet, smartphone, media, or technology use without a substantive social media component;
  • health or medical manuscripts that do not investigate a meaningful relationship with social media;
  • natural science manuscripts that do not address social media, science communication, public engagement, human behaviour, environmental response, or a related interdisciplinary question;
  • purely technical descriptions of software, algorithms, models, or engineering systems that do not examine their relevance to social media content, users, communication, behaviour, health, science, institutions, or societies;
  • descriptive reports lacking a clear research question, analytical framework, appropriate methodology, or identifiable scholarly contribution;
  • opinion-based claims that are not supported by appropriate evidence or scholarly argument;
  • manuscripts whose conclusions extend materially beyond the data or analysis presented;
  • promotional, commercial, or advertorial content; or
  • manuscripts that do not comply with the journal’s ethical, methodological, reporting, authorship, and transparency requirements.

Readership

JSOMER is intended for researchers, educators, healthcare professionals, scientists, engineers, practitioners, policymakers, and postgraduate students working in fields including:

  • communication and media studies;
  • psychology and behavioral sciences;
  • sociology and cultural studies;
  • education and digital literacy;
  • public health and health communication;
  • medicine, psychiatry, nursing, and allied health sciences;
  • business, marketing, and economics;
  • political science and public policy;
  • information and computer sciences;
  • artificial intelligence and human-computer interaction;
  • environmental and sustainability sciences;
  • science communication; and
  • computational social science and related interdisciplinary fields.

Publication language and frequency

JSOMER publishes full-text scholarly content in English. The journal is published quarterly, in March, June, September, and December.

Open-access model

JSOMER is an open-access journal that operates under a diamond publishing model. All published scholarly content is made immediately and permanently available without subscription, payment, or registration barriers. The journal does not charge authors any submission fees, article processing charges, publication fees, page charges, or other mandatory fees.