The oldest highly cited cyberbullying studies date from 2006. Smith et al. (2008) described its nature and impact among secondary school pupils, Tokunaga (2010) synthesised the first wave of victimisation studies, and Kowalski et al. (2014) produced the field's main meta-analysis. Hinduja and Patchin (2010) linked it with suicidal ideation. A second, separate literature in computer science builds classifiers that detect abusive messages. Check which one a paper belongs to before you cite it.
How the literature is organised
The earliest studies on this page are school surveys. Li (2006) surveyed 264 junior high school students, Li (2007) followed with "New bottle but old wine", Slonje and Smith (2008) asked whether cyberbullying was simply another type of bullying, and Smith et al. (2008) described its nature and impact in English secondary schools. Hinduja and Patchin (2008) analysed factors related to offending and victimisation among US adolescents.
Synthesis came quickly. Tokunaga (2010) critically reviewed and synthesised research on victimisation. Kowalski et al. (2014) meta-analysed the research and proposed the general aggression model as a framework for understanding it. Outcome studies link cyberbullying with distress (Schneider et al., 2012), with poorer psychological, physical and academic functioning (Kowalski and Limber, 2013) and with suicidal thoughts (Hinduja and Patchin, 2010).
Main debates
Is cyberbullying a distinct phenomenon? The question is in the titles of two early papers: Slonje and Smith (2008), "Another main type of bullying?", and Li (2007), "New bottle but old wine". Overlap with school bullying is large (Schneider et al., 2012). Measurement is the second issue: prevalence estimates in the 63 studies reviewed by Zhu et al. (2021) span tens of percentage points. Several of the outcome studies listed here, such as Schneider et al. (2012), are one-off surveys, so check the design before writing that cyberbullying causes an outcome.
Where recent work is heading
Recent psychological research covers the pandemic period (Barlett et al., 2021, comparing US adults before and during it), prevalence and mental health in new populations, including India (Maurya et al., 2022) and Saudi Arabia (Gohal et al., 2023), and family and emotion-regulation factors (Arató et al., 2022). Polanin et al. (2022) meta-analysed interventions and report that programmes significantly reduced cyberbullying perpetration (g = -0.18) and victimisation (g = -0.13), which are small effects. Three of the eight most-cited recent papers, however, come from computer science: detection with deep learning (Murshed et al., 2022), with social media features (Bozyiğit, Utku and Nasibov, 2021) and with hybrid language models (Raj et al., 2021). These papers evaluate classifiers, not young people, and should not be cited as evidence about prevalence or harm.
Most-cited foundational papers
Published before 2021 and ranked by how often later work cites them. Read the abstract of each and the full text of the three or four closest to your question. Citation count measures attention, not quality, so treat this as a map of what the field has argued about rather than a ranking of what is true.
Primary studies and conceptual papers from 2021 onwards. A paper published in 2024 has had a few years to accumulate citations where the works in the section above have had decades, so compare these counts with each other rather than with the ones above.
Cited by 108Open accessdoi:10.1186/s12888-023-04542-0
Recent reviews and meta-analyses
The fastest way into a literature. A good review gives you the structure of the field, a reference list to mine and, in its limitations section, the gaps other researchers have already spotted.
Carlos Evangelio and 3 others (2022). Computers & Education.
Cited by 153Open accessdoi:10.1016/j.compedu.2021.104356
How big the literature is, and where it is published
OpenAlex indexes 14,988 works whose title matches this topic. The chart shows how many were published each year from 2000 to 2025; the current year is left out because it is incomplete.
Show the numbers as a table
Year
Works
2000
3
2004
3
2005
9
2006
24
2007
46
2008
71
2009
160
2010
214
2011
236
2012
450
2013
475
2014
551
2015
626
2016
657
2017
642
2018
821
2019
900
2020
916
2021
920
2022
1,067
2023
1,235
2024
1,487
2025
1,815
Journals behind the most-cited work
Counted across the 359 most-cited works on the topic, not across everything published. Browsing recent issues of the first two or three is a reliable way to find current work that has not yet been cited much.
Computers in Human Behavior35 papers
Aggression and Violent Behavior16 papers
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health15 papers
Cyberpsychology Behavior and Social Networking9 papers
Journal of Adolescent Health9 papers
Frontiers in Psychology8 papers
Aggressive Behavior7 papers
Children and Youth Services Review7 papers
Search strings to copy
Written for databases that accept Boolean operators (Scopus, Web of Science, ERIC, PubMed, EBSCO). Quotation marks keep a phrase together, an asterisk stands in for the end of a word, and OR groups go in brackets. British and American spellings are written out with OR rather than covered by a single-character wildcard, because those wildcards differ between databases: PubMed’s help page documents the asterisk only, and asks for at least four characters before it. Limit the search to title and abstract first; widen it only if you get too little. Our guide to starting a literature review covers how to record what you searched.
Mental health outcomes
(cyberbullying OR "cyber bullying" OR (cybervictimisation OR cybervictimization) OR "online harassment") AND (adolescen* OR student*) AND (depress* OR anxiety OR suicid* OR "self-harm")
Risk and protective factors
(cyberbullying OR (cybervictimisation OR cybervictimization)) AND ("risk factor*" OR "protective factor*" OR parent* OR "school climate" OR empathy)
Interventions
(cyberbullying) AND (intervention* OR prevention OR program*) AND ("randomised" OR "randomized" OR "meta-analysis" OR evaluation)
Explore cyberbullying in Wonders →Opens Wonders on this question. Once you are signed in it becomes a project with suggested sub-topics and keywords you can edit before searching. The trial is 14 days.
Sub-topics to narrow into
A thesis-sized question usually sits inside one of these, combined with a population or a setting.
Definition and relation to traditional bullying
Smith et al. (2008) and Slonje and Smith (2008) ask whether it is another type of bullying or something new.
Machine-learning classifiers for abusive text, including low-resource languages (Mahmud et al., 2023).
How to cite these papers
Every paper above has a DOI, a part of the reference that is easy to leave out. Here is one of them, “Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization” (2010), in the two styles students ask about most:
APA 7th edition
Tokunaga, R. S. (2010). Following you home from school: A critical review and synthesis of research on cyberbullying victimization. Computers in Human Behavior, 26(3), 277–287. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2009.11.014
MLA 9th edition
Tokunaga, Robert S. “Following You Home from School: A Critical Review and Synthesis of Research on Cyberbullying Victimization.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 26, no. 3, 2010, pp. 277–87, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2009.11.014.
Check the details against the article itself before you submit: databases, including the one behind this page, sometimes carry the online-first year rather than the volume year. Full rules and more examples are in our guides to APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, Vancouver and ABNT, with the rest in the citation guides. You can also format a reference from its DOI with our free citation tools.
Frequently asked questions
How is cyberbullying defined?
The abstract of Smith et al. (2008) describes it as bullying using mobile phones and the internet; the article itself gives a fuller definition, which is the one most papers quote, so take the wording from the article and cite the page. Slonje and Smith (2008) and Li (2007) ask how far it is a new phenomenon or the old one in a new setting.
Is cyberbullying worse than traditional bullying?
The two overlap, so the effects are hard to separate. In the census of more than 20,000 high school students by Schneider et al. (2012), 59.7% of cyberbullying victims were also victims of school bullying, and distress was highest among victims of both. Kowalski and Limber (2013) found the most negative psychological, physical and academic scores among young people who were both bullies and victims, particularly online. Pupils surveyed by Smith et al. (2008) perceived the impact of most forms of cyberbullying as comparable to that of traditional bullying.
How common is cyberbullying?
Estimates range widely because definitions, time frames and age groups differ. Zhu et al. (2021) reviewed 63 studies and reported victimisation rates from about 14 to 58 per cent and perpetration rates from 6 to 46 per cent. Always report the measure and recall period alongside a prevalence figure.
How this page was made
The lists come from OpenAlex, an open index of scholarly works whose data are published under a CC0 licence, queried on September 21, 2026 for works whose title matches (cyberbullying OR "cyber bullying" OR cybervictimization). Only works with a DOI are listed. Each one was checked against the publisher’s own record at Crossref or DataCite (title, year, first author, journal, volume and pages), and in three cases, where the publisher deposited no byline, against PubMed; anything OpenAlex or Crossref flags as retracted was left out, and an editor took out results that matched the words but not the subject. Citation counts are OpenAlex’s on that date and are usually lower than Google Scholar’s, which counts more kinds of document. Ranking by citations tells you what a field has relied on, not what is correct; several heavily cited papers on any topic are cited because later work disputes them. Books without a DOI are missing, which matters in fields where the founding text is a book.
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