The Development of Studies on Electronic Government in Brazil: A bibliometric and sociometric study

This study aims to identify how the field of studies of electronic government is structured in Brazil. For this purpose, a bibliometric and sociometric study was conducted, analyzing 124 articles published in the proceedings of conferences and in Brazilian journals from 2007 to 2012. The main elements of the analysis were the volume of publications per year, the location of the publications and the conceptual and substantive domains of the studies, the methodological approaches used and the network of cooperation between authors and institutions. One of the findings of the study was that the production of works was prolific, but it was not possible to determine whether studies of electronic government were increasing or in decline because of the non-uniform behavior of the volume of publications. There was also little use of a conceptual domain or a clear position regarding the theoretical domain, with discussions being limited to the substantive domain. Finally, cooperation between authors remains limited to a small number of relationship networks. However, the opposite was true when it came to cooperation between institutions, for which there is a large network and room for other institutions to join.