The growing field of interdisciplinary research on user comments: A computational scoping review

Abstract

Online user comments (UCs) as the most popular type of online audience participation nowadays form a popular and important field of research. The widespread examination of UCs across different disciplines leads to a variety of terms and constructs and thus a missing clarity about the discussed topics. With this computational scoping review, we uncovered six relevant, overarching topics and their development in the field. Due to the combination of an automatic text analysis via structural topic modeling and a qualitative evaluation, we were able to describe the current state of UC research and found an inherently interdisciplinary body of literature. We observed an inter- and intradisciplinary fragmentation and call for a systematization of the used terms, constructs, and examined topics.