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Focus and scope

In The Journal of Social Media (JSM), the scholarly domains and areas of inquiry span a wide range of disciplinary paradigms, approaches, and perspectives, ensuring a comprehensive and multidisciplinary focus. These domains are essential to capturing the complexity of social media as both a technological phenomenon and a socio-cultural force. JSM defines social media as an evolving ecosystem of platforms, technologies, and practices that shape how individuals, communities, and institutions communicate, connect, and participate in digitally networked life. Social media encompasses social networking sites, messaging applications, content-sharing tools, group-based digital networks, and decentralised or emerging systems. Crucially, social media includes the algorithmic, data-driven and AI-enabled infrastructures that mediate visibility, interaction, identity construction, and public discourse. Social media is understood here not as a fixed category, but as a fluid, interdisciplinary domain situated at the intersection of technology, society, and culture.

Research landscape

The Journal of Social Media (JSM) offers a comprehensive and interdisciplinary platform for examining the dynamic and evolving landscape of social media. To guide scholarly engagement, JSM outlines key areas of inquiry, research perspectives, disciplinary paradigms, and methodological approaches that together reflect the journal’s commitment to intellectual diversity, critical rigor, and global relevance. This structure enables nuanced exploration of social media as both a technological system and a socio-cultural phenomenon, particularly within the context of the Global South.

Areas of enquiry
More specifically, the ten key areas of enquiry in JSM include:

1. Social Media Methodology and Ethics: Best practices, ethical dilemmas, digital research standards, and emerging methodologies.
2. Cyber Behaviour and Psychology: Digital identity, online influence, cyberbullying, addiction, and psychological well-being.
3. Marketing and Consumer Behaviour: Digital branding, influencer marketing, e-commerce, and social commerce trends.
4. Communications: Media effects, online discourse, misinformation, and digital public relations.
5. Health Informatics: Social media’s role in public health, digital health interventions, and crisis communication.
6. Business Management: Organizational social media strategies, digital transformation, and platform economies.
7. Education: EdTech innovations, online learning communities, and pedagogical applications of social media.
8. Artificial Intelligence: AI-driven content moderation, recommendation algorithms, and ethical AI in social media.
9. Environmentalism and Sustainability: Social media activism, climate change discourse, and digital environmental advocacy.
10. Politics: Digital diplomacy, political mobilisation, misinformation, and the role of social media in governance.

Key perspectives
Key perspectives used in social media research include:

• Network Perspective: Views social media as a network of interconnected nodes (users, content, platforms). Researchers analyse patterns of connections, information flow, and influence.
• Behavioural Perspective: Focuses on user behaviour, such as posting, liking, sharing, and commenting. This perspective often draws on psychological theories.
• Cultural Perspective: Examines how social media shapes and is shaped by cultural practices, norms, and values.
• Political Economic Perspective: Analyses the economic and political structures underlying social media platforms, including issues of ownership, commodification, and labour.
• Ethical Perspective: Focuses on the moral implications of social media use, including privacy, surveillance, and digital rights.
• Technological Determinism versus Social Shaping: Debates whether technology (e.g., algorithms) drives social change or whether social forces shape the use and development of technology.

Disciplinary paradigms
JSM accommodates a broad spectrum of axiological, epistemological and ontological perspectives, including but not limited to:

1. Positivism and Post-Positivism – Empirical, Quantitative Approaches to Social Media Measurement and Analysis
2. Interpretivism – Qualitative and Phenomenological Inquiries into User Experiences and Meaning-Making
3. Critical Theory – Examining Power Dynamics, Digital Inequalities, and Social Justice Concerns in Social Media
4. Constructivism – Investigating How Individuals and Communities Construct Reality Through Social Media Interactions
5. Postmodernism and Poststructuralism – Deconstructing Narratives, Identities, and Discourses in Digital Environments

Methodological approaches
JSM embraces methodological pluralism, including:

• Quantitative Research – Surveys, experiments, big data analytics, computational methods, and AI-driven analyses.
• Qualitative Research – Ethnography, netnography, discourse analysis, narrative inquiry, interviews, and case studies.
• Mixed Methods Research – Integrating quantitative and qualitative techniques for holistic insights.
• Computational Social Science – Leveraging machine learning, sentiment analysis, and algorithmic investigations.
• Critical and Interpretive Methodologies – Feminist, decolonial, and intersectional approaches to social media.

Geographical scope
The journal’s geographical coverage encompasses the Global South. The Global South refers to countries with histories of colonialism, economic underdevelopment, and socio-political challenges. These nations also have dynamic, emerging economies, cultures, and knowledge systems. While the term is geographical, it is better understood as a geopolitical and socio-economic classification.

Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The journal, in terms of its focus and scope, and, by extension, by the articles that are published in it, aims to contribute to the following SDGs through some specific focus areas:

• Goal 1 – End poverty in all its forms everywhere: Research that explores how social media facilitates economic empowerment, crowdfunding for poverty alleviation, and digital literacy initiatives that enable financial inclusion.
• Goal 2 – End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture: Studies that examine the role of social media in agriculture education, food security campaigns, and global food distribution awareness, helping to reduce hunger.
• Goal 3 – Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages: Research on health misinformation and disinformation, digital mental health support, and social media’s impact on psychological well-being.
• Goal 4 – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all: Studies on e-learning platforms, digital education initiatives, and social media’s role in knowledge dissemination.
• Goal 5 – Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls: Research that highlights how social media amplifies gender-based activism, contributes to online harassment and bullying reduction strategies, and fosters digital inclusion for women and girls.
• Goal 6 – Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all: Studies that explore social media advocacy for water conservation, digital activism on sanitation issues, as well as water crisis prediction strategies leveraging artificial intelligence and informed by social media analytics.
• Goal 7 – Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all: Research on social media’s role in promoting renewable energy adoption, public awareness campaigns, and corporate sustainability commitments will be featured.
• Goal 8 – Promote sustained, inclusive, and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all: Studies that examine gig economies, digital labour, influencer marketing, and social media’s role in entrepreneurship.
• Goal 9 – Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation: Studies on social media-driven technological advancements, digital infrastructure policies, and innovations in smart cities will be relevant.
• Goal 10 – Reduce inequality within and among countries: Social media research that serves as both a mirror and a catalyst in terms of reducing inequalities revealing systemic inequalities by highlighting voices of marginalised groups, providing real-time documentation, and offering data through netnography, which can also influence policymaking and promote digital inclusion.
• Goal 11 – Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable: Studies that focus on smart city initiatives, urban sustainability campaigns, and social media’s role in urban planning and disaster response.
• Goal 12 – Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns: Research on eco-conscious social media campaigns, sustainable influencer marketing, and online consumer awareness initiatives will be essential.
• Goal 13 – Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts: Research on climate change communication, online activism, misinformation on environmental issues, and policy advocacy via social media.
• Goal 14 – Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development: Research that explores digital advocacy for ocean conservation, as well as online awareness and interactive campaigns about topics such as marine life pollution and coral reef degradation and rejuvenation initiatives across the world.
• Goal 15 – Protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss: Studies that highlight reforestation efforts, wildlife conservation awareness, and social media’s role in environmental activism and education.
• Goal 16 – Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable, and inclusive institutions at all levels: Investigations into digital governance, misinformation regulation, human rights advocacy, and social media’s role in political engagement.
• Goal 17 – Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development: Research that explores collaborations between governments, NGOs, and corporations using social media to drive SDG initiatives globally.

Historic data

This journal was created to address a gap in global academic publishing. Despite social media's widespread influence, there is no dedicated journal for its comprehensive study. The founding editor saw this need after years of working in marketing, digital research, and higher education in the Global South. While there are numerous reputable journals that publish social media research, these publications are largely discipline-bound, rooted in communication or psychology, and often represent perspectives from the Global North. Existing outlets tend to treat social media either as a technological artefact or a communication channel, rather than as an evolving ecosystem with profound political, psychological, environmental, educational, and business implications. This journal was conceived in direct response to that gap. It is grounded in the belief that the study of social media requires an integrative, cross-disciplinary approach, and that scholarship from and about the Global South must be more than a token inclusion—it must shape the agenda. The journal is designed to provide an open-access, inclusive, and academically rigorous platform that supports diverse methodologies, embraces Southern epistemologies, and advances global conversations on digital life. Through this initiative, the journal offers not just an alternative to established publications, but a necessary evolution in the field of social media research.

We are working closely with relevant indexing services to ensure that articles published in the journal will be available in their databases when appropriate.

The full text of the journal articles is deposited in the following archives to guarantee long-term preservation:

• AOSIS Library
• Portico
• South African Government Libraries

AOSIS is also a participant in the LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) initiative. LOCKSS will enable any library to maintain their own archive of content from AOSIS and other publishers, with minimal technical effort and using cheaply available hardware. The URL to the LOCKSS Publisher Manifest for the journal is, https://thejournalofsocialmedia.org/index.php/jsm/gateway/lockss. Please inform us if you are using our manifest, as we would like to add your name to the list above.

A journal's Impact Factor was originally designed in 1963 as a tool for libraries to compare journals, and identify the most popular ones to subscribe to. It was never intended to measure the quality of journals, and definitely not the quality of individual articles.

The Impact Factor is a journal-level measurement reflecting the yearly average number of citations of recent articles published in that journal. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field; journals with higher Impact Factors are often deemed to be more important than those with lower ones. Therefore, the more often articles in the journal are cited, the higher its Impact Factor.

The Impact Factor is highly discipline-dependent due to the speed with which articles get cited in each field and the related citation practices. The percentage of total citations occurring in the first two years after publication varies highly amongst disciplines. Accordingly, one cannot compare journals across disciplines based on their relative Impact Factors.

We provide several citation-based measurements for each of our journals, if available. We caution our authors, readers and researchers that they should assess the quality of the content of individual articles, and not judge the quality of articles by the reputation of the journal in which they are published.