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In August 2020 I joined a new research project with several American academics involving the social media website Reddit. We are aiming for at least 3-4 papers with the first two being a systematic literature review of Reddit and a paper on data ethics.

My co-authors and collaborators for these projects are Nicholas Proferes from the University of Kentucky, Michael Zimmer from Marquette University, Sarah Gilbert from the University of Maryland and Casey Fiesler from the University of Colorado Boulder.

Systematic literature review

Drawing on Michael Zimmer and Nicholas Proferes’ expertise on literature reviews from their previous work on Twitter (Zimmer and Proferes, 2014) our project is mapping out the diversity of academic disciplines, data types, methods and analysis across studies on Reddit.

As of October we have identified approximately 730 studies on Reddit after first round of qualitative coding analysis and reading of each individual journal article, book section and conference paper. Which compares to approximately 200 studies identified by myself previously in a non-systematic review.

Ethics research

The second preliminary papers will investigate further how researchers mention and discuss ethics across a variety of disciplines, methods and topics when using Reddit data.