Bibliometric Analysis of Citation Trends and Publications on E-government in Southern African Countries: A Human-computer Interactions and IT Alignment Debate

Abstract

Due to technology adoption, many countries are embracing e-government. This study presents the growth and pattern of research on e-government articles and conference proceedings internationally, by scholars in the Southern African countries. It presents research patterns, trends and current gaps in e-government, as well as the most prolific authors and the level of outputs’ prominence. This paper uses bibliometric tools to present the analysis of articles on Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar databases. R computational programming for big data analysis was used to generate summarized metrics. The citation sample size was (n = 33,689), µ = 625, and the outputs impact based on total link strength of citations were; min =11.0, max = 1,686.0 and µ = 118.2, showing the Southern African scholars outputs visibility and prominence on e-government research. The findings present the most prolific authors in the Southern African region and the prominence of their outputs on e-governance. The study, through the computational synthesis of the data, also reveals some of the missing links in e-governance research designs and implementation. Furthermore, the study indicates that the service-oriented design of e-government platforms are still lacking, and the integration of Information Technology (IT) alignment, which is necessary to successfully implement e-government is lacking. The use and integration of mobile technology to enhance citizen-centric and participatory public governance platform and e-government implementation is not sufficiently addressed. Therefore, there is need to measure the maturity level of e-government IT deployment, its user-interfaces, as well as the design of an e-government that is able to respond to often embryonic and heterogeneous needs of citizens