How does the Online Community Sharing Research Conceptualize Social Capital? A Literature Review

This study analyzed how social capital is conceptualized in the existing empirical studies of online community knowledge sharing. We firstly introduce the theoretical concept of social capital, followed by an examination of the variables representing the concept in ten empirical information science research papers. We further used Nahapiet and Ghoshal’s (1998) three-dimensional framework for conceptualizing social capital (i.e., structural, relational, cognitive) to compare the variables. The systematic literature review and analysis allows for a revelation of how the relatively complicated social capital concept has been constructed and operationalized in empirical research and shed light on how the conceptualization may be strengthened in future studies.