These data were collected for the paper, "Social media data for environmental sustainability: a critical review of opportunities, threats and ethical use" published in One Earth. It includes a database of studies applying social media data in environmental sustainability research, which were collected and reviewed in full by the authors. Rather than providing a comprehensive summary of all relevant literature like in a systematic review, our objective was to take stock and evaluate the previous body of work in the field in order to promote conceptual innovation from its critical examination. Building on a set of 169 studies collected in a previous systematic review of social media data applications in environmental research (Ghermandi and Sinclair 2019), the database includes additional relevant studies that were identified by snowballing previous references and adding further gray and scientific academic articles known to the authors. For studies to be included in our analysis, they had to involve the use of data from one or more social media platforms and investigate human interactions with and/or impacts on the environment. We relied on a broad definition of social media including any website or application that enables users to create and share content or to participate in social networking (e.g., blogging sites, recommendation sites, and online forums). We further strengthened the analysis by including insights from additional literature on social media that do not have a direct application to environmental sustainability (e.g., studies on biases in social media data). The final database consists of 415 studies, which were published between 2011 and 2021.

Peer reviewed