An analysis of electronic government research from the perspective of developing countries

The purpose of this paper is to explore the progress of research to date by systematically analysing the existing body of knowledge related to issues of e-government in developing and under-developed countries and to determine whether there is a lack of theoretical development and rigour in this area. Usable data relating to e-government research which is currently available were collected from 158 research articles identified from the ISI Web of Knowledge database and by manually identifying relevant articles from journals dedicated to electronic government research. Based on our investigation of the extant literature, we found that generic e-government applications were explored more than any specific applications. It was also discerned that adoption and diffusion were the most commonly explored themes; access to only one case study, website content, community, organisation, culture, or country were the major limitation across all the studies.