A Review of e‑Government Research as a Mature Discipline: Trends, Themes, Philosophies, Methodologies, and Methods

Abstract

Abstract: This paper aims to identify themes, trends, research philosophies, methodologies and methods used in E‑Government studies. This research uses a novel structure literature review method to capture the evolving research focus in the E‑Government literature. It examines all abstracts from the European Conference on E‑Government (ECEG) papers from 2007 to 2012 and International Conference on E‑Government (ICEG) papers from 2007 to 2010. This paper also compares previous research covering themes and models of E‑Government research. The research findings are: 1) case study and potential case study is dominant methods, 2) there are various research philosophy, methodology and methods on e‑government field, and 3) e‑government is evolving over time and is maturing as a discipline. An analysis also shows lack of works covering development of theory in e‑government domain. This paper provides further contribution by using a novel approach for conducting a structured literature review, based on evaluating abstracts and key words, and in a corresponding method to method to validate classification of themes that emerge using focus group discussion sessions.