Òscar Coromina

ABSTRACT This paper critically audits the search endpoint of YouTube’s Data API (v3), a common tool for academic research. Through systematic weekly searches over six months using eleven queries, we identify major limitations regarding completeness, representativeness, consistency, and bias. Our findings reveal substantial differences between ranking parameters like relevance and date in terms of video recall and precision, with relevance often retrieving numerous off-topic videos.

Introduction Understanding the methodological implications of digital mediation has been a key concern across the social sciences and humanities in recent years (Kitchin, 2014). Digital methods emerged in these debates as a distinct methodological approach, characterized by ‘online groundedness’ (Rogers, 2015) that neither declare ‘the end of theory’ (Anderson, 2008) nor treats digital media as ‘new terrains for old methods’ (Venturini and Latour, 2010: 2).