Abstract: [Purpose/Significance] A systematic analysis of health rumors in the social media environment will help to expand the research vision of health informatics and provide reference for the scientific governance of health rumors. [Design/Methodology] This study combines bibliometrics and content analysis. Based on the discrimination of health rumors and their related concepts, the data bases of SSCI, SCI, PubMed, CSSCI, CSCD, and PKU core journals are employed as data sources. As such, 213 articles published before April 14, 2022 are analyzed in this study. As such, we sort out and summarize these research from the perspectives of characteristics, dissemination, and governance of social media health rumors. [Findings/Conclusion] The research reveals the characteristics, dissemination elements and identification methods of social media health rumors, and finally constructs a multi-agent collaborative governance framework for social media health rumors. Accordingly, this study proposes the future research directions, including building a public corpus of health rumors, paying attention to the research on multimodal health rumors, attaching importance to health rumors whose authenticity has been proved to be not false, revealing the differences of the dissemination characteristics of health rumors in different media, and studying the health rumors combining the features and advantages of Library and Information Science. [Originality/Value] Under the background of the implementation of Healthy China Strategy and the construction of network governance system with Chinese characteristics, this paper combs the domestic and foreign research on social media health rumors, clarifies the thread of thought and the development trend of research on social media health rumors, and puts forward the research direction of social media health rumors in the future.

Keywords: Health rumors, Social media, Rumor characteristics, Rumor dissemination, Rumor governance