A Quantitative Study on the Research Fronts of Electronic Government

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the volume of research output on the topic of electronic government. To understand the dynamics of this research field, we conducted a quantitative analysis on 2232 articles published on SCI, SSCI journals. We identified the top 20 key authors, who published most, and the top 20 highly cited and pivotal documents in this research field. We used a bibliometrics analysis software CiteSpace II to visualize the trends and patterns in the scientific literature. From analysis of the cluster views and time-zone views, it is found that the hotspots in the research of electronic government include the enhance e-government cross-sectoral collaboration ability, the construction of e-government, the security infrastructure design of digital government in a multiple and complex environment. Meanwhile, the research front of electronic government is performance evaluation.