Appendix: Methodology

This report’s goal is to create a systematic review of the key components of social science XR research in 2022, including theory, method, language, and technology. We define social science XR research as a body of literature dedicated to the study of society and human relationships as they are formed by, and formative of XR technologies. In order to create this systematic analysis, we used academic databases Scopus, EBSCOhost, and Web of Science to identify core journals dedicated to XR research within the realm of the social sciences. This excluded journals which were too broad in scope, like media studies journals, or those that were too technical and did not have a social science focus, like engineering-based journals. In turn, we managed to identify three, peer-reviewed journals in English, which had published regularly throughout 2022: Frontiers in Virtual Reality and Virtual Reality and Presence: Virtual and Augmented Reality. For more information about these journals see Table 1 below.

Table 1: Journal Selection

Each of the five sections of the report was handled by one or two Section Editors (authors). With the exception of the Knowledge Mapping Review and XR Commercial Innovation sections, each of the other sections followed these parameters:

Each Section Editor drew from the corpus of all 344 available research publications from the three core journals from 2022 (this excluded any pieces like book reviews, editorials, and corrections). The Section Editors then supplemented this pool of literature with additional database searches for other, relevant, peer-reviewed articles in English during 2022, which were not published within the three core journals. This additional step was deemed necessary by the Section Editors in order to capture as systematic a picture of each of the components (theory, method, language, and technology) as possible. Each Section Editor then read through the corpus of core articles and additional literature to manually identify themes and patterns as related to their specific component of analysis.

It is worth noting that the XR Technology section applied a unique methodology for its thematic analysis. It applied a combination of topic modeling (Blei et al., 2003) and qualitative analysis to the abstracts of the journal articles to identify relevant themes. Specifically, a topic model using Latent Dirichlet Function allocation (LDA) was used to identify six groupings based on the distribution and co-occurrence of the nouns and adjectives in the abstracts. This produced a stable model with reasonable separation between the identified topics. The top 50 terms were examined for each topic/theme and the top 15 abstracts that ranked highest for each topic were examined, too. Each theme has been labeled based on this qualitative coding and they are subsequently presented in order of the proportion of abstracts for which a theme is dominant. The theme numbers are those assigned by the model and included for ease of reference.

Knowledge Mapping Review

The goal of this section was to give a broad overview of XR social sciences research in 2022. Thus, the search parameters had to expand beyond the three core journals and their 344 articles. To obtain a fuller picture of the peer-reviewed articles published 2022, seven keywords were identified: XR, VR, AR, mixed reality, virtual reality, extended reality, and augmented reality. The same search for these keywords within the article title, abstract, and keywords was triangulated across the three databases of EBSCOhost, Scopus, and Web of Science. This yielded similar results in terms of number of publications, but Scopus was selected as the database to use due to its ability to select ‘social sciences’ as a category filter. In turn, the following string query was applied to yield the full population of XR-themed, social science, peer-reviewed articles published in 2022:

TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "XR" OR "VR" OR "AR" OR "mixed reality" OR "extended reality" OR "augmented reality" OR "mixed reality" ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBSTAGE , "final" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( PUBYEAR , 2022 ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( DOCTYPE , "ar" ) ) AND ( LIMIT-TO ( LANGUAGE , "English" ) )

This query yielded 1,457 articles on January 9, 2023. A similar query, minus the ‘social science’ filter, was conducted to yield the full population of peer-reviewed, English language XR publications in 2022. This was used for comparative purposes. The second query yielded 15,738 articles on January 9, 2023.

XR Commercial Innovation

Lastly, unlike the other sections, which based their analysis upon the 344 core articles from the three core journals plus the addition of any relevant literature, the main source of data for this section instead comprises popular literature and press releases. Since many commercial innovations take a while to seep their way into research, this approach was deemed necessary in order to be able to comment upon the nature of the commercial XR market and its relationship to our current state of research.

1. 2022 still presented an unusual year for publishers dealing with the disruptions of COVID-19. Some journals did not publish any issues and this particular journal published a reduced schedule, some of which contained papers that were originally ready for publication in the previous years. ↑