Global divides in academic knowledge production: mapping social media and society research

In the past two decades, research on social media and society has grown into a major interdisciplinary field, analyzing how identity, politics, and knowledge circulate through digital platforms and reshape global communication. Yet as the field expands, questions remain about its intellectual structure and global inclusivity. This study offers a dual contribution: first, it uses topic modeling and natural language processing to identify dominant research themes in abstracts of 6,001 peer reviewed articles on social media and society. Second, it examines citation disparities based on author affiliation and international collaboration. Results reveal a thematic concentration on identity, activism, and misinformation but also a citation hierarchy favoring authors from OECD countries, with no consistent advantage for international collaborations. Importantly, the study finds that even when funding is held constant, OECD based authors receive disproportionately higher citations, suggesting that epistemic inequality stems from deeper structural and symbolic hierarchies. The study contributes to the field by combining bibliometric and critical methods, offering a reflexive, data driven account of global divides in who produces and who receives credit for knowledge in the digital age.