Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 29th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview WG2: E-government (Physical) Author(s) Lan Umek University of Ljubljana Ljubljana Slovenia Aristovnik Aleksander, Todorovski Ljupco, Title A bibliometric analysis of digital era governance research: An overview over the past two decades File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Lan Umek Abstract Digital technologies profoundly influenced social and economic realities, making the world more difficult to govern. These changes reached public administration, including public governance. The transformational role of the internet had a fundamental impact on the relations between governmental institutions and citizens. The internet has accordingly paved the way for the emergence of a new public administration model called Digital Era Governance (DEG) in which digital technologies are in the centre of governments’ organizational structures. The observed rapid pace of the digital transformation of society in the recent years is raising the need for governments to urgently change their modus operandi. Namely, DEG challenges public administration, requiring its internal and external opening, and lead to an administrative set-up characterized by simplification, automation of daily bureaucratic work and flexibility in delivering services. Accordingly, the understanding of the evolution of scientific knowledge on DEG research is of crucial importance, since it is not only beneficial for the scientific community, but also for evidence-based policymaking with a view to fully addressing the issues related to DEG. Despite several attempts in the existing literature to present the development of DEG research, there is still a lack of systematic analysis to the root of DEG research in order to offer dynamic evolution of this field of knowledge. Accordingly, the main aim of the paper is to fill the gap in the existing literature and provide an unprecedented, comprehensive and in-depth examination of digital era governance research over the past two decades. Specific objectives concerning the analysis on DEG research include: 1) assessing the evolution over time; 2) finding the most relevant and impacting countries, institutions, journals and authors; 3) identifying research hotspots; and 4) identifying disappeared research topics and those that are currently in vogue. To pursue these objectives, a bibliometric analysis is used, allowing for an innovative literature review approach and significantly upgrading traditional literature review techniques. The bibliometric analysis is based on the Scopus database including 3,917 documents published between 2000 and 2019. In this context, several innovative bibliometric approaches are applied. The results suggest that a comprehensive and in-depth approach is required for a better understanding of the DEG research evolution over time. The findings will be beneficial not only for the scientific community, but also for evidence-based policymaking with a view to fully addressing the issues related to DEG. At the same time, the findings will also serve as an important source for the identification of related research gaps.
