This paper analyses the first five volumes of research published in the International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR). All 90 papers that appeared between the years of 2005 and 2009 are analysed by extracting information on the following variables: most active authors, gender of the contributors, academic expertise/research area, background (academic vs. practitioner), number of co-authors, universities associated with the most publications, geographical diversity of the authors and occupations of the contributors. Findings suggest that there are very few authors contributing to more than one article in IJEGR. Findings also suggest that there are imbalances in terms of authors’ discipline, gender and background. Finally, this paper illustrates the institutions supporting electronic government research and countries and regions promoting e-government research and practice. The main contribution of this research lies in understanding the evolution and patterns of the electronic government research community.
Top1. Introduction
There are only few journals (namely, Electronic Government, an International Journal (EG), International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR), Government Information Quarterly and Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TGPPP)) that publishes research on e-government. IJEGR is one of two oldest outlets for such research and has already published substantial research in the area of e-government in its first five volumes. As described on its home page “The International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) is a peer-reviewed, multi-disciplinary, international journal that publishes high-quality, original research about electronic government. The journal also serves as a forum for scholars and practitioners to present theoretical and philosophical discussions on current issues relating to the practice of electronic government.1”
Since this is an emerging cross disciplinary area of research, a longitudinal review of the e-government outlets would help to depict evolution of the domain in terms of the research community engaged in creating the body of knowledge and various theoretical and methodological practices. Gronlund (2005) analysed 170 papers published at three major e-government conferences, namely, DEXA E-govt (Europe Based), Digital Government conference based in US and the European Conference on E-Government. This study examined conference papers in terms of rigour, relevance, and use of theory (Gronlund, 2005). Similarly a number of other previous studies have explored and reviewed theoretical and methodological practices (Al-Sebie et al., 2005; Belanger et al., 2005; Chircu, 2008; Ghapanchi et al., 2008; Gottschalk, 2007; Heeks & Bailure, 2007; Irani et al., 2007; Palanisamy, 2004; Yildiz, 2007; Wu et al., 2009) of research in the electronic government area. However, only one attempt has been made to depict the demographic profile of the electronic government researchers published in the TGPPP (Dwivedi, 2009). Since IJEGR has completed five years of publication, it is useful to create a demographic profile of the authors as it will help to create a profile of researchers publishing in the area of e-government. Such efforts will provide new researchers in the area of e-government with a list of active researchers for collaboration and guidance, as well as help future editors and associate editors with a list of potential expert reviewers (Palvia & Pinjani, 2007; Dwivedi & Kuljis, 2008; Dwivedi et al., 2008, 2009).
Considering the above discussion this paper conducted an analysis of 90 IJEGR publications in terms of: E-government research trends; gender of contributing authors; authors background (i.e., home departments, academics or practitioners); number of co-authors; affiliations of the authors; and geographic diversity of contributing authors.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides a very brief discussion of the profiling methods employed in the analysis. The findings are presented in Section 3. Finally, Section 4 presents conclusions and future research directions from this work.