A literature review for recommender systems techniques used in microblogs

Online social networks (OSNs) are receiving great attention from the research community for different purposes, such as event detection, crisis management, and forecasting, among others. The increasing amount of research conducted with social networks opens the need for a classification methodology regarding trends in the field. This work does not cover all types of social networks; it focuses on the analysis of microblogs as a data source in the context of recommender systems (RSs). The main goal of this work is to provide authors with insights on the trends of academic literature reviews in the proposed context and to provide a comparison of different research approaches. The authors searched for up-to-date research papers related to RS methods using microblogs within a time period of five years, from 2012 to January 2018. Starting from 2012, a significant amount of research related to the subject field of RSs was conducted and identified by the authors of this work. After the filtering process, 39 papers were finally selected from journals and conferences in four different databases related to Internet technologies (i.e., IEEE, ACM, Science Direct, and Springer). A general classification presented in this work is then adopted and used to describe state-of-the-art social network recommendation approaches for microblogging. This work can be extended in the future to include novel methodologies and trends of RSs for microblogs.