Internet, one of the fastest-growing technology worldwide, has provided many conveniences for people in various ways. However, this trend has also influenced our lives seriously. In this internet generation, social media's appearance transforms economic and social life, and mental health becomes a rising concern. This change leads many studies to analyse the effect it may have on people's mental health. To better understand the impact arouse from the internet and social media, this study applied the main path and meta-analysis to lay the groundwork for understanding the research trend and investigate the effect of internet use on the components of psychological well-being and distress.
A total of 1240 articles published around 1998-2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science. By building the citation relationship of all papers, we visualized the key development of studies on the main path. The result shows that there are three notable development phases in this research field. The first stage focuses on exploring the relationship between the internet and psychosocial well-being. In the second stage, scholars investigate the two faces of social media. Lastly, In the third stage, they try to find alternative strategies to cope with the adverse effects. Furthermore, we come out with three-dimensional factors that have been discussed overpass thirty years.
In order to address the mixed finding on the association between social media and mental health, the synthesis effect size from 37 independent studies was conducted via meta-analysis. Results found that, first, social media usage frequency, in general, was positively correlated with both increases in psychological well-being and psychological distress. Second, a specific meta-analysis based on SNS functionality resulted in a statistically significant positive correlation between social media usage for information, entertainment, and social purpose with the increase in well-being. This study's significance may provide valuable information about the most relevant main body of knowledge diffusion of mental health research.

Internet, one of the fastest-growing technology worldwide, has provided many conveniences for people in various ways. However, this trend has also influenced our lives seriously. In this internet generation, social media's appearance transforms economic and social life, and mental health becomes a rising concern. This change leads many studies to analyse the effect it may have on people's mental health. To better understand the impact arouse from the internet and social media, this study applied the main path and meta-analysis to lay the groundwork for understanding the research trend and investigate the effect of internet use on the components of psychological well-being and distress.
A total of 1240 articles published around 1998-2020 were retrieved from the Web of Science. By building the citation relationship of all papers, we visualized the key development of studies on the main path. The result shows that there are three notable development phases in this research field. The first stage focuses on exploring the relationship between the internet and psychosocial well-being. In the second stage, scholars investigate the two faces of social media. Lastly, In the third stage, they try to find alternative strategies to cope with the adverse effects. Furthermore, we come out with three-dimensional factors that have been discussed overpass thirty years.
In order to address the mixed finding on the association between social media and mental health, the synthesis effect size from 37 independent studies was conducted via meta-analysis. Results found that, first, social media usage frequency, in general, was positively correlated with both increases in psychological well-being and psychological distress. Second, a specific meta-analysis based on SNS functionality resulted in a statistically significant positive correlation between social media usage for information, entertainment, and social purpose with the increase in well-being. This study's significance may provide valuable information about the most relevant main body of knowledge diffusion of mental health research.

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