Name it as you like it? Keeping pace with social media something

Social media has emerged over the last decade and consequently has accompanying information systems (IS) research. In this paper, however, we argue that researchers cannot keep pace with the rapid changes this topic engenders. This claim is substantiated by a database built from 28,283 articles published in either top IS journals, i.e., ELMA, BISE, and all AIS basket journals, or IS conference proceedings, i.e., ICIS, ECIS, AMCIS, WI, HICSS, and PACIS. We derive a set of 13 keywords that have been used to describe what we call the ‘social media phenomenon’. The results are transformed into a four-phase model and a taxonomical categorization, which provides an exhaustive overview of social media terms and trends and reflects the main research issue facing academia: The fact that the versatile social media phenomenon in its current phase is dominated by just two terms—“social media” and “social network”—or imprecise “such-as-Facebook” analogies.