Citation Analysis of Innovative ICT and Advances of Governance (2008-2017)

TL;DR

This study analyzes research on Internet Plus Government (IPG) from 2008 to 2017, highlighting how new ICTs have transformed governance, data use, and citizen interaction, while also presenting new challenges in e-democracy.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive citation and content analysis of 2105 articles to understand ICT adoption and interactions in the IPG initiative over a decade.

Findings

IPG enriched government information infrastructure

Open data and social media increased data-driven decision making

New ICTs created challenges for e-democracy

Abstract

This paper opens by introducing the Internet Plus Government (IPG), a new government initiative emerging in the last decade. To understand benefits and challenges associated with this initiative worldwide, we conducted analyses on research articles published in the e-governance area between 2008 and 2017. Content analysis and citation analysis were performed on 2105 articles to address three questions: (1) What types of new ICT have been adopted in the IPG initiative in the past decade? (2) How did scholars investigate interactions between the new ICTs and governance core to IPG? (3) How did the new ICTs interact and shape while also being shaped by the evolution of governance in the past decade? Our analysis suggests that IPG initiative has enriched the government information infrastructure. It presented opportunities to accumulate and use huge volume of data for better decision making and proactive government-citizen interaction. At the same time, the advance of open data, the widespread use of social media and the potential of data analytics also generated great pressure to address challenging questions and issues in the domain of e-democracy.