YouTube in scientific research: A bibliometric analysis

YouTube has become the object of scientific research in different subject areas. This study aims to provide an overview of the citation rate of YouTube since its launch in February 2005, based on the Scopus citation database. The total number of citations to YouTube in Scopus in the 12 year period was 36,486 of which the highest number of citations was 8,145 in 2016. It is also shown that YouTube-uploaded videos are highly cited by social sciences, computer science, arts and humanities, engineering, and medicine. It can be seen that researchers from the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Germany, China, and Spain cite YouTube-uploaded videos more than others. The analysis of document types indicates that articles rank first with 48.2 percent of all Scopus documents citing YouTube from 2006-2016, followed by conference papers (21.9%), book chapters (11.9%), reviews (7.7%), books (7.0%), and so on. It can be concluded that YouTube is cited increasingly by different subject areas, by different languages (especially English), and by various countries