Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based

on Bibliometrics

Qian Cui and

Zhimo Zhao

Department of Public Affairs and Administration, University of Electronic

Science and Technology of China,

Chengdu, China

Keywords: Digital Governance, Bibliometrics, Knowledge Structure.

Abstract: In the past decades, digital governance has developed into an important research field, which deserves a sys-

tematic review and evaluation of its research status, topic evolution, and research prospects. Based on the

Bibliometrics package, Vosviewer, and Citespace software, this study conducts bibliometric analysis in the

field of digital governance research. The literature sample for this study is obtained from the Web of Science

database, containing 2258 articles. First of all, through the analysis of the number of papers published, deter-

mine the publication trend of digital governance research. Secondly, through the citation analysis between

authors and literature, the highly cited authors and important literature in the field of digital governance are

discussed. Finally, through the knowledge structure analysis of the digital governance research field, includ-

ing author, journal co-citation analysis, topic evolution analysis, and other methods, the topic evolution and

future research direction of digital governance research are discussed.

1 INTRODUCTION

Digital governance refers to the behavior process of

related affairs involving enterprises, social organiza-

tions, individuals, and other multiple subjects under

the government's leadership, aiming to improve the

level of digital governance by enabling the govern-

ance system through digital technology. Digital gov-

ernance is a multi-level, complex, and dynamic re-

search topic, involving communication, public man-

agement, law, network security, and other disciplines.

And there is a lack of systematic research review on

digital governance. By means of bibliometrics, this

paper deeply analyzes the research topic of digital

governance and its dynamic changes deeply analyze

the existing research content of digital governance,

points out the shortcomings of existing research on

digital governance and puts forward research pro-

spects based on this.

2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

2.1 Bibliometric Method

Bibliometrics is a method based on mathematics, sta-

tistics, and information science to study the develop-

ment trend and subject field of a discipline through

bibliometrics, knowledge graph, data visualization,

and other relevant technical means. The commonly

used tools of bibliometrics mainly include

Vosviewer, Citespace, and the bibliometric toolkit in

R language. This paper uses these three tools to con-

duct an in-depth analysis of the research status of dig-

ital governance.

2.2 Bibliometrics Toolkit in R

Language

Bibliometrics is an R package based on literature net-

work analysis. Compared with other R packages used

for bibliometrics, Bibliometrics has more powerful

functions and a more simple and direct presentation.

The categories of functions of Bibliometrics include

data import, descriptive statistics, co-occurrence ma-

trix presentation, knowledge graph rendering, etc.

Cui, Q. and Zhao, Z.

Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based on Bibliometrics.

DOI: 10.5220/0011738700003607

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Public Management, Digital Economy and Internet Technology (ICPDI 2022), pages 413-422

ISBN: 978-989-758-620-0

 2023 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. Under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

413

This paper attempts to use the toolkit to conduct cita-

tion analysis and theme evolution analysis of relevant

literature on digital governance.

2.3 Vosviewer

Vosviewer is a Java-based free software oriented to

literature data, suitable for the analysis of modular

non-project networks, focusing on the visualization of

scientific knowledge. The core idea of the software is

"co-occurrence clustering," the idea that if two events

occur at the same time, then there is a degree of cor-

relation between them. There are many kinds of rela-

tionships that vary in strength and relationship to each

other. Different types of clusters can be found by

clustering the measurement indicators of relationship

strength and direction. This paper will use this soft-

ware to complete the co-citation analysis and litera-

ture coupling analysis of the digital governance liter-

ature.

3 CITESPACE

Citespace is an information visualization tool devel-

oped by Professor Chaomei Chen from Drexel Uni-

versity in the United States, which is specially used

for academic literature analysis. It is suitable for mul-

tivariate, time-sharing, and dynamic complex net-

work analysis, and can detect hot topics and their evo-

lution in a certain discipline or field. At present, it has

been widely used to detect and analyze the changing

trend of the research frontier, the relationship be-

tween the research frontier and the knowledge base,

and between different research frontiers. This paper

tries to use Citespace software to conduct a co-cita-

tion analysis of digital governance research literature.

4 DATA COLLECTION

In order to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the field

of digital governance, we first collected data from the

Web of Science, including the Citation Index of Nat-

ural Science and Social Science, SCI and SSCI), and

choose 1999-2022 as the literature research time of

digital governance. The main reason for choosing to

start the study in 1999 is that the relevant search terms

are locked in "digital governance". The first title re-

sult is "Winds of Change: Digital technology, trans-

action information, and Intellectual Property manage-

ment" (Tang, 1998). This paper focuses on the impact

of digital governance on global and digital market

formation. After discussion, this paper is considered

the beginning of research related to digital govern-

ance. The research period 1999-2022 is chosen to

help find all articles on digital governance research by

keyword. Then, based on the researchers' understand-

ing of the field of digital governance, "digital govern-

ance", "e-government", "data governance", "algorith-

mic governance" and "platform governance" are se-

lected as the final keywords of digital governance re-

search. Then, the relevant keywords of the selected

digital governance are extracted and analyzed. Fi-

nally, 2258 articles were selected for bibliometric

analysis.

Then the collected data text is analyzed bibliomet-

rically. Firstly, the built-in function of Web of Sci-

ence is used to analyze the number of published arti-

cles included. Then, the Bibliometrics toolkit is used

to analyze the number of published articles, authors,

and citations, followed by word frequency analysis

and topic evolution analysis. In addition, Vosviewer

and Citespace are used for co-citation analysis. Fi-

nally, the research prospect is prospected according

to the analysis results.

5 RESULT

5.1 Annual Publication Trend

As shown in Figure 1, scholars begin to publish pub-

lications on digital governance in 2003 according to

the time distribution of publication years. The number

of publications on digital governance fluctuates in the

single digits from 2003 to 2011 and increases signifi-

cantly each year from 2011 to 2021. In particular, in

the past two years, the annual increase in articles

reached more than 50. The increase in the number of

papers indicates that digital governance has attracted

more and more attention from the academic commu-

nity, and a large number of research results have been

published exploring the technological construction,

application scenarios, policies, and regulations of dig-

ital governance, etc. This shows that the research field

of digital governance is still in the stage of rapid de-

velopment, the research results are constantly emerg-

ing, and the research prospect is relatively broad.

5.2 Source of Publication

Using the R language Bibilometrics toolkit for "the

most relevant articles" function, to explore digital

governance-related articles of use, The results are

shown in Table 1. Based on the distribution of articles

across journals, the most popular digital governance

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414

study is Government Information Quarterly, with 36

articles.

Government Information Quarterly is an interna-

tional journal exploring the intersection of policy, in-

formation technology, government, and the public.

This is followed by sustainable development, with 32

and 20 papers published, respectively. The main

themes of Sustainability include definition and quan-

tification of sustainability; sustainable economic de-

velopment and enterprise management. Among them,

the articles related to digital governance published in

this journal mainly discuss digital governance in en-

vironmentally sustainable development and the inter-

relationship between digital governance and sustain-

able governance. In third place is Big Data & Society,

which publishes articles related to digital governance,

mainly including urban case studies of digital govern-

ance and cross-country comparative studies of data

governance.

At the same time, the H index and G index can be

used to comprehensively judge the journal contribu-

tion of digital governance research. The H-index, also

known as the H-factor, is a measure of academic

achievement and represents high citations. It can be

used to evaluate the productivity and citation impact

of relevant publications. The G index is the derivative

index of the H index, which can "average" highly

cited articles to more articles to a certain extent. H in-

dex and G index have both advantages and disad-

vantages, so this paper tries to incorporate both in-

dexes into the evaluation of journal contribution. The

results show that if the H index is used as the evalua-

tion criterion, the index value of Government Infor-

mation Quarterly is 18, ranking first. Public Manage-

ment Review and Sustainability rank second and

third. If the G index is used as the ranking standard,

the Government Information Quarterly is still ranked

first, and Sustainability and Public Management Re-

view is followed by second and third. Through the

above three indicators, it can be seen that the number

of relevant articles published by the Government In-

formation Quarterly, G index, and H index rank first

place in the theme of digital governance. Therefore,

this journal is a core journal in the field of digital gov-

ernance.

Figure 1: Annual Scientific production between 1999-2021 [Self-drawing].

Table 1: Ranking of publication sources based on the number of articles [Self-drawing].

Sources G index H index

Government information quarterly 30 18

Sustainability 17 10

Public management review 15 10

Information communication & society 12 6

Big data & society 10 8

Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based on Bibliometrics

415

Table 2: Ranking of publication sources based on G index and H index [Self-drawing].

Sources Article

Government information quarterly 32

Big data & society 20

Canadian public administration-administration Publique du Canada 18

International journal of operations& production management 15

Information communication & society 14

Figure 2: Most cited authors within the examined documents [Self-drawing].

5.3 Citation Analysis

Author-cited Analysis.

Citation analysis is used to study the most frequently

cited authors and documents in the academic field.

The number of citations generally represents the con-

tribution of the author or literature to the academic

field. In this paper, the "Most Relevant Authors" fea-

ture in the Bibliometrix toolkit is used to analyze the

most frequently cited Authors in the digital govern-

ance domain, and the results are shown in Figure 2. It

can be seen that WillamSon B is the most cited author

in the field of digital governance, with the number of

citations reaching 64 times. Suzor N, Van Gleen T,

and West S M rank joint second, respectively, with

the number of citations being 24 times.

Literature-citation Analysis.

The literature citation analysis method in the Biblio-

metrics toolkit is mainly implemented through local

literature citation analysis and global literature cita-

tion analysis. This paper tries to use these two meth-

ods to conduct a citation analysis of the relevant liter-

ature on digital governance. At the same time, the

function of "Most Local Cited Documents" in the

Bibliometrix toolkit is used to analyze the Most Cited

local literature in the field of digital governance, and

the analysis results are shown in Table 3. It can be

seen that Williamson B's article "Digital Education

Governance: Data Visualization, Predictive Analyt-

ics, and 'Real-Time' Policy Instruments' are the top

citation with 16 citations (Williamson, 2016). This ar-

ticle focuses on a case study of digital education data

systems, to explore the choice and application of pol-

icy tools for digital education governance. The author

of the second most cited article is still Willamson B,

which mainly discusses the emergence and applica-

tion of digital governance technology in British pub-

lic education (Williamson, 2015). The third to fifth

articles focus on the value assessment of the govern-

ance legitimacy of online intermediaries (Suzor,

2018), the Web presence and improvement measures

of educational digital governance (Barns, 2017), and

the current status and challenges of digital infrastruc-

ture governance (Fung, 2015).

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Table 3: Ranking of articles based on Global citations [Self-drawing].

Title Author Year

Global

citations

Putting the Public Back into Governance: The Challenges of Citizen Par-

tici

ation and Its Future

Fung A 2015 365

Digital government evolution: From transformation to contextualization Janowski 2015 190

The second wave of digital-era governance: a quasi-paradigm for the

overnment on the Web

Margetts H 2013 164

What is platform governance? Gorwa, R 2019 140

Big data in the policy cycle: Policy decision-making in the digital era Hoechtl, J 2016 101

Table 4: Ranking of articles based on Global citations [Self-drawing].

Title Author Year

Local

citations

Digital education governance: data visualization, predictive ana-

tics, and 'real-time'

olic

instruments

Williamson B 2016 19

Governing software: networks, databases and algorithmic power

in the di

ital

overnance of

ublic education

Williamson B 2015 13

Digital Constitutionalism: Using the Rule of Law to Evaluate the

Legitimacy of Governance by Platforms

Suzor n 2018 12

Diagrams of Europeanization: European education governance in

the di

ital a

Decuypere M 2016 11

Digital Infrastructures and Urban Governance Barns S 2017 10

Fung A's article "Bringing the Public Back to

Governance: The Challenge of Civic Engagement

and Its Future" is ranked number one in the world's

most cited literature (Fung, 2015). This paper mainly

discusses the value orientation of participatory gov-

ernance. It also highlights the challenges to participa-

tory governance posed by the development of digital

technologies and the growing demands of citizens for

personalized governance. Janowski's article, which

presents a phased model of the evolution of digital

government and provides some evidence to explain

the phased model, comes in second (Janowski, 2015).

The third to fifth literature mainly discusses the gov-

ernance model in the digital era (Margetts, 2013), the

interdisciplinary research paradigm of platform gov-

ernance (Gorwa, 2019), and ICT for policy decisions

(Hochtl, 2016).

Citation analysis only shows the contribution of

authors and documents in the field of digital govern-

ance research to the academic field. However, as a

dynamic research system, the digital governance re-

search field needs to understand the knowledge struc-

ture of digital governance. Knowledge structure

shows research structure and dynamic presentation in

academic research. At the same time, the knowledge

structure is helpful to determine the main theme of

digital management and explore the dynamic changes

between theme analysis, in order to further under-

stand the digital governance research in the field of

knowledge structure, the next will be led by the au-

thor, literature analysis, frequency analysis, theme

evolution analysis, to further explore digital govern-

ance research field.

5.4 Co-Citation Analysis

Author Co-Citation Analysis

The basic assumption of the author co-citation analy-

sis method is: that when the literature of two authors

is cited by the literature of the third author at the same

time, then there is a co-citation relationship between

the two authors. The higher the frequency of co-cita-

tion between two authors, the closer the academic re-

lationship between scholars is. Then, by clustering,

multi-dimensional scale analysis, and other statistical

methods, the author identifies the scientific commu-

nity in the academic field. This paper visually pre-

sents relevant literature on digital governance through

co-citation analysis of Vosviewer software, and the

results are shown in Figure 3. Among them, node size

represents the frequency of authors' common cita-

tions, and different colors of nodes represent different

clusters formed by authors' research.

The co-citation analysis based on the authors re-

veals four clusters formed by digital governance re-

search. As can be seen from Figure 3, the co-cited

sources of the cluster are public institutions repre-

sented by the European Union and the European

Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based on Bibliometrics

417

Figure 3: Author co-citation analysis [Self-drawing].

Commission. The cluster mainly involves the formu-

lation of digital governance regulations, the improve-

ment of digital governance policy documents, and the

formulation of national data security regulations and

problem governance. The second basic cluster is

formed around Janssen M, Dunleavy P, and other au-

thors. The research on citizen participation, citizen

empowerment, blockchain governance, digital plat-

form governance, and governance in the digital age is

the core of this cluster. The core authors of the third

cluster mainly include Kitchin R and Williamson B.

This cluster mainly discusses smart city governance

and smart education governance, and the fourth clus-

ter mainly discusses the governance application and

improvement of information technology.

Literature Co-Citation Analysis

The "literature co-citation" function in Citespace soft-

ware is used to conduct knowledge graph analysis on

the paper texts collected by digital governance re-

search. After entering the software and selecting the

project, the time and slice parameters are adjusted,

and the clipping function and path-finding function

are canceled. After selecting "Reference" as the anal-

ysis target, click visualization. After the data visuali-

zation is completed, the Citespace menu bar is used

to adjust the size of labels and lines, and the image

position is adjusted to perform clustering processing.

The TF-IDF algorithm is chosen for clustering pro-

cessing because it has obtained a general consensus

in acad demia. After that, satisfactory maps are ob-

tained by clustering labels and algorithms, and fi-

nally, four digital governance literature clusters are

obtained by literature co-citation analysis. The first

type of literature cluster is named "Public Health

Data".

The literature in this field focuses on the risks and

challenges faced by public health governance in the

era of big data, as well as the countermeasures. The

second kind of literature cluster mainly discusses the

influence and function of the digital economy on so-

cial governance and emergency management. Niu,

FJ, for example, based on the survey of four different

types of employees, adopts a structural equation

model approach to explore the role and mechanism of

the digital economy on socio-economic reform and

governance (Niu, 2022)

The results show that there

is a certain degree of relationship between the digital

economy and the social governance system, and the

sustainable digital economy system confirms the me-

diating effect between them. With this revelation, the

government should grasp the connection between

digital economy and governance, and promote digital

economy and digital governance level. The third kind

of literature cluster mainly focuses on data govern-

ance. The main contents of this research focus on the

core ownership, nature, rights, and interests of data

and the discussion of many rights and obligations in

the process of digital governance, such as personal

privacy, data property rights, and digital sovereignty.

The fourth type of document clustering is named

"joint research agenda", this topic mainly discusses

the constitutional governance platform management,

digital and other emerging research fields of digital

governance, needs joint efforts of the scholars to de-

velop related technical framework, to promote the

emerging research paradigm in the field of digital

management to further improve, further enrich the re-

search theory.

5.5 Word Frequency Analysis

Word frequency analysis is a common statistical anal-

ysis technique used in information retrieval and text

mining, which is used to analyze the number of repe-

titions of a word in a text or material database. Word

frequency analysis helps to clarify the key themes

emerging from digital governance research. In this

study, the number of words in the keyword module of

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418

Figure 4: Word frequency analysis [Self-drawing].

the paper is selected as the measurement index, be-

cause the keyword module is more suitable for the

topic expressed in the paper, so the selected words are

more representative. Therefore, through the Biblio-

metrics toolkit in R language, the word frequency

analysis function is used to conduct word frequency

statistics for the keyword module of the relevant lit-

erature on digital governance and the results are

shown in Figure 4. It can be seen that:

The word "governance" appears the most, and the

number of occurrences reaches 221 times. Digital

governance, in the final analysis, is to achieve reason-

able and effective governance of digital scenes, digi-

tal business forms, digital economy, and other rele-

vant digital scenes through digital technologies such

as big data, artificial intelligence, and blockchain.

The terms "technology" and "technological transfor-

mation" rank second and third. It can be seen the im-

portance of the application of digital value technol-

ogy. Digital management is inseparable from the uni-

versal application of technology. Digital management

is equivalent to management with technology to some

extent. Through the application of relevant digital

technologies, governance institutions promote the

modernization, intelligence, and automation of gov-

ernance models.

The term "COVID-19" ranks fourth the number of

times, which reflects the academic community's

widespread concern about the optimization and im-

provement of the global digital governance model.

For instance, Lee and other scholars discuss the spe-

cific role of digital governance in the process of sup-

porting public crisis management in the context of the

COVID-19 pandemic by integrating the relevant

analysis framework through the case study of South

Korea (Lee, 2020).

The academic discussion on

COVID-19 and digital governance provides benefi-

cial enlightenment for the governing bodies to apply

digital governance technology such as health codes to

the practice of public crisis.

"Data governance" is even more frequent, appear-

ing 36 times. Human society has entered the era of big

data, and data elements have become the most critical

digital resource. The main content of digital govern-

ance research focuses on the core ownership, nature,

rights, and interests of data, and discusses many rights

and obligations in the process of digital governance,

such as personal privacy, data property rights, digital

sovereignty, and so on. Therefore, many scholars

have discussed the connotation and system improve-

ment of digital governance from the perspective of

data.

5.6 Strategic Map Visualization

Analysis

On the basis of word frequency analysis, the visual

analysis of strategic maps is helpful to better under-

stand the research topic of digital governance. The

strategic map is composed of two dimensions: cen-

trality and density. Centrality is a measure of the im-

portance of a topic in a research field, and a strategic

density map is drawn by centrality and density, and

the "thematic map" function is realized by the Biblio-

metrix toolkit function. The result is shown in Figure

Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based on Bibliometrics

419

Figure 5: Strategic map visualization analysis [Self-drawing].

The topic located in the fourth quadrant of the

strategy diagram is called the core topic, and it is the

core of all research topics. The core themes of digital

governance mainly include "digital governance inno-

vation", "e-government", "big data governance",

"digital city", "Internet platform governance" and

other related topics. Themes in the second quadrant

of the strategic map are also known as "mobile

themes". The theme of the movement represents the

development theme in the field of digital governance,

which is of great significance to the research of digital

governance. "Digital governance innovation" and

"digital cooperative governance" are the movement

themes of digital governance. The topics covered by

"digital governance innovation" mainly include "gov-

ernance", "innovation" and "management", while the

topics covered by cooperative governance hotspots

include "state", "cooperative management", "docu-

ment analysis" and "evolution". The topic density of

the ecological theme is high, but the centrality is low.

These issues have little impact in areas where internal

links have been established, but their external im-

portance is negligible. "Cyber security" is one of the

ecological themes of digital governance, mainly in-

volving global security digital governance, cyber se-

curity digital governance capacity building, digital

trade and so on.

The topic density of the ecological theme is high,

but the centrality is low. These issues have little im-

pact in areas where internal links have been estab-

lished, but their external importance is negligible.

"Cyber security" is one of the ecological themes of

digital governance, mainly involving global security

digital governance, cyber security digital governance

capacity building, digital trade security strategy, etc.

Emerging or declining topics have low density and

relevance, and may be new or disappearing topics.

Topics in this category include "digital infrastruc-

ture", "digital workforce", "Digital economy and dig-

ital investment", "smart healthcare", etc.

The visual analysis of strategic maps helps to un-

derstand hot themes, movement themes, ecological

themes, and emerging or declining themes of digital

governance, and plays an important role in under-

standing the core concepts of key themes of digital

governance. However, from the time dimension, the

specific situation of the conceptual structure change

in the digital governance domain is not clear. There-

fore, this paper will introduce the theme evolution

analysis method to analyze the evolution of the digital

governance theme in chronological order and discuss

the emergence, development, and evolution process

of the digital governance theme in detail.

5.7 Theme Evolution Analysis

Through visualization tools such as the Sankey dia-

gram, the topic evolution analysis of the digital gov-

ernance research field is carried out. The reason why

the Sankey diagram is used for topic evolution analy-

sis is that the Hat Sankey diagram can effectively de-

scribe the flow of one set of data to another, and can

also reflect the size of the specific data flow through

the block, suitable for topic evolution analysis. At the

same time, this way can be proved by dividing and

comparing different periods. Using the thematic evo-

lution function in the toolkit of the Bibliometrics

package in R language and the time function for time

slicing, 1999 and 2010 are used as the starting point

and compound point of the research to analyze the

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420

Figure 6: Theme evolution analysis [Self-drawing].

theme evolution of the collected digital governance-

related literature. The results are shown in Figure 6.

In the first period, from 1999 to 2009, "actor-net-

work theory" is the biggest theme in the development

of this field. The actor-network theory provides the

basic theoretical support for digital governance re-

search and the participation mode of governance sub-

jects. For example, other topics include "information

technology", and "e-government. The reason for the

small number of topics is mainly that the research on

digital governance was still in its infancy at that time.

In the second period, from 2009 to 2019, more re-

search topics appear in the field of digital governance,

and relatively important research topics appear in this

period. Digital government is one of them. In addi-

tion, during this period, many new research topics ap-

peared in the field of digital governance, such as al-

gorithm management, application of algorithm tech-

nology, discussion of algorithm discrimination, and

construction of algorithm supervision model. The

emerging themes also include digital health govern-

ance and digital cooperative governance, etc. These

emerging themes mark the research trend and re-

search frontier of algorithmic governance.

In the third stage, the research topics of digital

governance have further changed, and many new re-

search topics have emerged, such as the phenomenon

of convergence in digital governance, smart agricul-

ture, data governance, Internet platform governance,

digital governance under COVID-19, digital trade,

digital finance, etc. At the same time, the basic

themes. That is, the themes of digital government, e-

government, and governance have been further deep-

ened and developed, the research content has been

continuously expanded and the research results have

been constantly fruitful.

6 CONCLUSION

Based on the Bibliometrix toolkit in R language,

Citespace, and Vosviewer software, this paper dis-

cusses the contribution of authors, literature, and jour-

nals in the research of digital governance to the per-

formance of this research field. At the same time, it

discusses the knowledge structure of the field of dig-

ital governance through the co-citation analysis of au-

thors and literature. Preliminary results are obtained:

Government Information Quarterly is the core

journal in this field, and this journal contributes 32

relevant articles to the field of digital governance re-

search. These articles mainly discuss the choice of the

digital governance model and the case analysis of dig-

ital governance countries and cities. Other core jour-

nals in the field of digital governance research include

Sustainability, Public Management Review, Big Data

& Society, etc. After that, the core authors and litera-

ture of digital governance research are identified

through citation analysis. It is found that Williamson

B, Suzor N, Van Gleen T West S M, and others are

the core authors in this field.

Through author co-citation analysis and literature

co-citation analysis, the knowledge cluster of digital

governance research is deeply analyzed. At the same

time, the rise and fall of digital governance research

themes are understood through theme evolution anal-

ysis. The results show that the phenomenon of citizen

collaboration in digital governance, smart agriculture,

data governance, and platform governance become

the frontier directions of digital governance research.

At the same time, there are also the following de-

ficiencies in the research process to be improved;

First of all, bibliometric technology itself has some

Research Progress and Trend Analysis of Digital Governance Based on Bibliometrics

421

shortcomings. Bibliometric technology can only pro-

vide a snapshot of the research field. Researchers

need to combine context, discourse analysis, and nar-

rative analysis to have a more detailed understanding

of the research content. The second is the limitation

of data sources. Core journals in English included in

the Web of Science require high impact factors,

which may exclude good works from newly pub-

lished journals. Based on the above research deficien-

cies, the deficiencies of bibliometric analysis can be

improved through text narrative analysis, meta-anal-

ysis, and other research methods. At the same time,

the index scope can be expanded to include more and

higher quality digital governance articles in the re-

search scope.

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