Social tagging in the scholarly world

The number of research studies on social tagging has increased rapidly in the past years, but few of them highlight the characteristics and research trends in social tagging. A set of 862 academic documents relating to social tagging and published from 2005 to 2011 was thus examined using bibliometric analysis as well as the social network analysis technique. The results show that social tagging, as a research area, develops rapidly and attracts an increasing number of new entrants. There are no key authors, publication sources, or research groups that dominate the research domain of social tagging. Research on social tagging appears to focus mainly on the following three aspects: (a) components and functions of social tagging (e.g., tags, tagging objects, and tagging network), (b) taggers' behaviors and interface design, and (c) tags' organization and usage in social tagging. The trend suggest that more researchers turn to the latter two integrated with human computer interface and information retrieval, although the first aspect is the fundamental one in social tagging. Also, more studies relating to social tagging pay attention to multimedia tagging objects and not only text tagging. Previous research on social tagging was limited to a few subject domains such as information science and computer science. As an interdisciplinary research area, social tagging is anticipated to attract more researchers from different disciplines. More practical applications, especially in high‐tech companies, is an encouraging research trend in social tagging.