What do you mean by “social media”? Introducing the Reporting Items for Social Media Research (RISoMeR)

Scholars from various disciplines study social media. However, neither researchers nor users have a unified understanding of social media. Even more problematically, many researchers do not define how social media is understood in their studies reducing the transparency, interpretability, and comparability of research. In this article, we introduce the Reporting Items for Social Media Research (RISoMeR), a flexible and easy-to-use matrix with which researchers can transparently report which understanding of social media they apply in their research. The RISoMeR suggests that on Dimension 1, researchers report if they take a technology-centered, usage-centered, or user-centered perspective. In Dimension 2, researchers should report which features and functionalities they use as defining characteristics of social media. We describe applications of the approach.