Meta-analysis of political communication research on Twitter: Methodological trends

Abstract

This meta-analysis examines the methodological tendencies of scientific research about political communication on Twitter published in journals based on Spanish-speaking countries between 2019 and 2021. It covers all the journals indexed in the JCR and the two first quartiles of Scopus index, producing a universe of 1.233 articles, of which 51 addressed political communication on Twitter. The focus is set on the following methodological parameters: sample types and construction, time periods, geographical areas, methodologies, multimedia analysis, general research themes and approaches, and software resources. The aim is to provide a map of recent research in the Spanish-speaking scientific community and to identify widespread methodological trends. A significant trend of software dependency was identified, i.e. published research often consists of the mere application of a certain software to a certain dataset, without enough discussion on the possible biases introduced by the software and the sampling methods.

Keywords

• Political communications
• Twitter
• meta research
• meta-study
• methodology
• sampling bias