FindingsThe majority of published work relating to Tumblr concentrates on conceptual issues, followed by aspects of the messages sent. This has evolved over time. Perceived benefits are the platform's long-form text posts, ability to track tags, and the multimodal nature of the platform. Severe research limitations are caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the limited API, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts on the site. Research limitations/implicationsThis study focuses on Tumblr: the applicability of the approach to other media is not considered. We focus on published research and conference papers: there will be book content which was not found using our method. Tumblr as a platform has falling user numbers which may be of concern to researchers. Practical implicationsWe identify practical barriers to research on the Tumblr platform including lack of metadata and access to big data, explaining why Tumblr is not as popular as Twitter in academic studies. Social implications Page 1 of 55Journal of Documentation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 Originality/valueThere has not yet been an overarching study to look at the methods and purpose of those who study Tumblr. We identify Tumblr related research papers from the first appearing in July 2011 until July 2015. Our classification derived here provides a framework that can be used to analyse social media research, and in which to positionTumblr related work, with recommendations on benefits and limitations of the platform for researchers.