Bibliometric Mapping of Media Policy per Data from Web of Science (2000-2019)

Objective
Bibliometric studies prevent the abandonment of knowledge, the unbalanced growth of science fields, and the production of duplicate research. Media policy is one of the important fields of media management. Media policy is concerned with the media industry regulating activities to protect and develop the interests of stakeholders, and to control the power in this industry (Labafi & Williams, 2019). Media policy determines and affects how media industries develop (Doyle, 2013). Media policy is a product of national political, cultural, and social ideologies (Ots and Krumsvik, 2016; Freedman, 2008; Freedman, 2018; Labafi et al., 2020). It helps to achieve specific goals of the governing system (Hutchison, 1999), retain and attract stakeholders, and control power in the industry (Labafi et al., 2019). Some scholars accept the state intervention at a minimum level (Evans, 2016) and suppose that various players such as states, civil institutions, and users should take part in policy-making (Puppis, 2010). However, it depends on a specific context. Regarding either national or international legislation systems, previous studies (Van Cuilenburg and McQuail, 2003; Lund, 2004; Freedman, 2011) indicate that media policy requires a series of socially accepted principles. Up until now, the studies in the field of media policy followed a variety of approaches, and the diversity of its studies in each period was proportionate to the media industry regulation needs (Van Den Bulck et al., 2019). Awareness of the studies on this field facilitates predicting the future of these studies and their influence on policy-making in the media industry. No research has been carried out neither on the status of scientific products of media policy nor on the growth pattern of these products based on the indices of network and cluster analysis. Bibliometric studies can provide an effective tool to prevent the marginalization of applied knowledge, unbalanced growth of some fields of science, and conduction of duplicate studies. This paper reviewed and analyzed the studies conducted in this field using network and cluster analysis. It is seeking to draw a Bibliometric map following the papers published in the field of media policy.
 
Research Methodology
This research was carried out using network analysis techniques, as well as cluster analysis. The data collection entails the search of paper titles comprising five keywords related to media policy (freedom of speech, copyright, privacy, data protection, and net neutrality). The research population included all papers on the Web of Science in the field of media policy from 2000 to 2019. The aforesaid records were downloaded and stored (a total of 900 were stored and processed). The clustering and visualization techniques were used by Vos Viewer, 1.6.13 to respond to the research questions.
 
Findings
The findings suggested that the majority of the papers were carried out in 2018, i.e., 112 papers, and the highest number of citations amounted to 630 in 2017. A total number of 1873 authors were studied in this citation network, which included 119 authors as nodes in the co-authorship network map of media policy. In this research, the evolution of keywords’ co-occurrence and authors’ collaboration networks were drawn from 2000 to 2019 in the four-time intervals of the end of 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019. The most repeated concepts in the papers were social media, media policymaking, privacy, information security, regulation, politics, Facebook, etc. The most repeated and co-occurred concepts were classified into 5 clusters. The most important cluster consisted of concepts related to social medial regulation; in this cluster, concepts such as Web-2, information privacy, Twitter, Facebook, security, copyright, impact, new media, data protection, trust, and policy co-occurred more than 4 times. In addition, the authors’ collaboration network among the universities of different countries was specified together with adjustments on the world map and geographical dispersion. The co-authorship map of media policymaking includes 119 nodes. Considering the novelty and interdisciplinary nature of this field, there is no large network of cooperation, and authors are usually willing to write and publish their works individually or less cooperate with those in this network. Figures such as Philip Napoli, Des Freedman, and Petros Iosifidis have published several works individually without cooperation or through minimum cooperation with those in this network. The largest co-authorship network in this map consists of 12 authors, such as Paola Mancini, Carlo, and Bellini.
 
Discussion & Conclusion
The Bibliometric maps demonstrated the necessity of considering the growing themes and trends in a scientific field. The Bibliometric mapping of Media Policy proposed in this research indicated the emphasis on privacy in the studies in this field, which is convergent with the requests of the social media users in this regard. Furthermore, the co-occurrence of keywords suggested that researchers are more inclined to work on the big data and media platforms at their disposal and seek to conceptualize the ownership of these data using various approaches. The media industry policymakers are recommended to seriously consider the most repeated concepts of papers because these abstract concepts will turn into real needs of the industry and users in the future. Events such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal well indicated that the media industry needs to come up with new policies to deal with changes. The public discourse now demands the regulation of media platforms; the demands in this regard cover a wide range from the necessity of monitoring media platforms to the need for media platforms to be accountable for user-generated content. The diversity and multiplicity of studies on media policymaking can help policymakers to develop and implement better policies.