e-Government is a research topic that arouses the interest of many researchers all around the world. So, we can find a large number of studies and research projects published about this topic. Given the large number of articles that exist in the literature, it is not possible to get an idea of the evolution shown by the field of study and see the topics that are not receiving attention from researchers. The objective of this chapter is an analysis of the academic literature on e-government and the evolution of this field of knowledge. These findings allow us to have a clear idea of the evolution of e-government field, the disappeared research topics, and those that are currently in a lively debate. This analysis could be of interest to identify the trend in research of the e-government field of knowledge, as well as to examine the specialization of certain research topics.
TopIntroduction
Many governments Many governments around the world have carried on many innovative e-Government projects (Anthopoulos & Fitsillis, 2014), given that these initiatives have promoted the transformation of public management adopting technological advances that favor democratic legitimacy, participation in the configuration of public policies and in the transparency of public resources management. (Aham-Anyanwu & Li, 2017). These initiatives favor access to public information which allows citizen to be informed of the public policies and decisions adopted by public managers and politicians (Karamagioli et al., 2014), increasing trust in governments (Ohemeng & Ofosu-Adarkwa, 2014) and enhancingcitizen participation in public affairs (Ahn & Berardino, 2014; Rodríguez Bolívar, 2015).
In this regard, governments use the social networks more frequently to relationship with citizenship, civil organizations, firms, and so on, spreading information and encouraging citizen participation (Aladalah et al., 2018; Maxwell & Carboni, 2017). Through these networks, citizens can communicate their perceptions, expectations and experiences with public services, and can also demand services that better satisfy their needs (Rodríguez Bolívar & Alcaide Muñoz, 2018).
These increasing demands of the citizenry push governments to develop tools, apps and platforms to facilitate the participation in decision-making in public affairs. This way, the governments have to face these demands, undertaking initiatives and projects involving different stakeholders (Wimmer & Scherer, 2018). The new technologies Web 2.0 facilitate the context and environment to undertake collaborative projects, and those in which citizens can participate in the co-creation of public services achieve more citizen-centric services adapted to their needs.
In addition, the initiatives of Smart Cities (SCs) favor the innovative and technological spaces to promotes the citizen participation, which enables the cooperation and co-creation among governments, organizations and citizens (Ferro & Osella, 2017), which allows to improve the citizenship’s quality of life. So, the environment of SCs favors the direct connection with citizenship (Deakin & Reid, 2017), allowing them to solve their own problems with the technology available through e-Government practices or even with technologies created for collaboration with citizenry.
Therefore, e-Government is a research topic that arouses the interest of many researchers all around the world (Alcaide Muñoz et al., 2018). So, we can find a great number of studies and research projects published about this topic (Alcaide Muñoz & Rodríguez Bolívar, 2015). Previous studies have tried to offer information about contextualization of this field of knowledge (Alcaide Muñoz & Garde Sánchez, 2014). However, we go further and offer an improved previous version of e-Government study (Alcaide Muñoz & Garde Sánchez, 2014), offering evolution of this field, the disinterested topics, the trending topic and so on. This analysis could be useful to identify the state of the art in e-Government, offering research possibilities for the future.
Thus, this article aims at assisting researchers to develop e-Government. To achieve this aim, we have analyzed e-Government articles published classified in three sub-periods: pre-crisis (2000-2008), crisis (2009-2013) and post-crisis (2014-2017) periods. Hence, this paper seeks to answer each of the following research questions:
RQ1: How many e-Government articles have been published in the analyzed JCR journals? Will this selection of articles reveal any trend?
RQ2: What research methodology is used in analyzing e-Government? Which countries make the most important contributions in this respect?
RQ3: Which universities and departments make the most important contributions in this respect?