The widely shared definition of e‐Government: An exploratory study

This paper aims to provide details of a study on the widely shared definition of e‐government and to help scholars – especially young scholars – to understand the scope and meaning of the field.

From 1998‐2007, a ten‐year time‐span, 632 articles from the three world‐leading academic databases, including Wiley InterScience, Elsevier ScienceDirect, and SCI Expanded, were retrieved and 324 were analyzed using CATA software (Concordance 3.20), to identify the vocabulary that was used frequently by e‐government scholars. Then the distinct vocabulary was used to construct the widely shared definition of e‐government.

In those 324 articles, 57 words generated from the text analysis formed the basis for imputing a widely shared definition of the field of e‐government. The definition was conceptualized by six elements.

Two limitations of the pool of articles selected may be noted. First, articles were drawn from three leading academic databases in an effort to distinguish e‐government from other fields; but such an approach omitted any consideration of how e‐government definitions varied from different academic fields. Second, because the pool of articles was drawn only from these three, journals excluded by these databases were thus omitted.

The study is unique in that it discusses the definition of e‐government by an exploratory approach. The universal shared definition extracted could serve as either a screen or a magnet for future research. And the methodology could be applied to several academic fields, including administration and management, library and information science, e‐records management, computer science, etc.