– The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new viewpoint series, Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research, by providing an overview of the key challenges in social media research and some current initiatives in addressing them.
– The paper considers publication output from disciplines dealing with social media studies and summarises the key challenges as discussed in the broader research community.
– The paper suggests that challenges originate both from the interdisciplinary nature of social media research and from the ever-changing research landscape. It concludes that, whilst the community is addressing some challenges, others require more attention.
– The paper summarises key challenges of social media and will be of interest to researchers in different disciplines, as well as a general audience, wanting to learn about how social media data are used for research.
