Exploring the Intellectual Structure of “Fear of Missing Out” Scholarship: Current Status and Future Potential

Abstract

Fear of missing out (FoMO) is a psychological construct that recently emerged in the age of social media. This study aims to provide an overview of the progress on FoMO research and offer a future research agenda based on FoMO-related scientific articles published. We carried out this aim using a two-stage methodological approach, based on an initial pool of 314 peer-reviewed articles in the Scopus database: (1) co-citation analysis, a bibliometric analysis technique, with a subset of 103 articles to show how FoMO research develops intellectually; and (2) a systematic review to discuss clusters that emerged after co-citation analysis. Results of the co-citation analysis uncovered four clusters: (1) social media, (2) negative affectivity, (3) problematic social media use, and (4) problematic smartphone use. We discuss the content of each cluster in the context of central themes, key theoretical influences, and characteristic methodological approaches. We also present a future research agenda based on this discussion. In conclusion, this study provides an up-to-date overview that can assist researchers in understanding and designing future FoMO research and for practitioners to improve the well-being of society or users.

Acknowledgments

We thank the editor and anonymous reviewers for their critical and guiding comments that significantly improved our study during the revision process. Also, we thank PhD—Eray Polat for his important contributions to this work.

Author contributions

Fatih Çelik: Conceptualization, Literature review, Methodology, Investigation, Resources, Validation, Data curation, Writing-Original draft preparation, Project administration.

Mehmet Ali Koseoglu: Methodology, Validation, Formal analysis, Software, Visualization, Writing-reviewing and editing.

Jon D. Elhai: Supervision, Writing-reviewing and editing.

Ethical approval

This research has never been published before and is not currently considered by another journal. All the authors approved the article in the study, and they all agreed to submit it.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest regarding this paper. However, outside the scope of the present paper, Dr. Elhai notes that he receives royalties for several books published on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD); is a paid, full-time faculty member at University of Toledo; occasionally serves as a paid, expert witness on PTSD legal cases; and receives grant research funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Notes

1 The citation numbers in this study are based on the publications in the references of 314 articles in our data set. That is, these publications are cited by the total number of references in our dataset as many times as in this study. In brief, these numbers do not represent global citations. On the other hand, although we carefully reviewed all the articles included in our dataset, we do not cite all of them as this would increase the length of our article. The full list of datasets is available as an online supplement.

2 We present the most-cited articles of FoMO-related articles in the co-citation analysis. For this reason, several FoMO studies have cited Festinger (1954). This gives us a clue about how the FoMO field is shaped.

3 We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing this limitation to our attention.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fatih Çelik

Fatih Çelik is an Assistant Professor at the Trabzon University, Turkey. He received his doctorate degree in Public Relations and Publicity from Selcuk University in 2019. His research interests include social media, new media, digital marketing, and quantitative method. For contact: @fatiihceelik on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Mehmet Ali Koseoglu

Mehmet Ali Koseoglu is an Assistant Professor at the Metropolitan State University. He is the Editor of the International Journal of Bibliometrics in Business and Management (IJBBM). His research interests include strategic management and bibliometric analysis in business and management.

Jon D. Elhai

Jon Elhai is a Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Toledo. His primary area of research is in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), studying underlying dimensions, and relations with cognitive coping processes and externalizing behaviors. He also conducts research on cyberpsychology, examining problematic internet and smartphone use.