Title: Mapping out e-government research literature: How interdisciplinary was it for the blooming decades?

Authors: Sungsoo Hwang; Philip Murphy

Addresses: Department of Public Administration, Yeungnam University, 280 Daehak-Ro, Gyeongsan, Gyeongbuk 38541, South Korea ' Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, 460 Pierce St, Monterey, CA 93940, USA

Abstract: The goal of this research is to empirically map out e-government literature to gauge the progress of the domain in the blooming years of studies. Since the 1990s, studies of e-government underwent exponential growth. Given the nature of its inquiry, e-government studies cut across the multiple disciplines. This study investigates how multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary e-government studies were. This work is meaningful in two ways. First, it adds empirical analysis to existing anecdotal evidence of e-government literature as e-government studies are maturing after a decade of exponential growth. Second, it serves as a teaching and research tool to help students and new scholars, identifying important scholars and works in the study domain. The main finding of this study is that digital government studies are conducted within multiple disciplines but lack genuine inter-disciplinary works. Some key journals are identified and key research topics are coded and illustrated.

Keywords: e-government literature; digital government literature; citation analysis; citation networks.

DOI: 10.1504/EG.2017.086684

Electronic Government, an International Journal, 2017 Vol.13 No.3, pp.224 - 241

Received: 17 May 2016
Accepted: 03 Mar 2017

Published online: 18 Sep 2017 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article