Assessing the Impact of Smart Cities on Local E-government Research: A Bibliometric Study

Abstract

This article presents a bibliometric study on the impact of smart cities development on local e-government research. This is relevant because the concept of smart cities has evolved from being essentially focused on the management of the cities’ infrastructures to include other aspects such as quality of life, economic growth, sustainability and participatory governance, thus partially overlapping the previously existing concept of local e-government. To inform the study, three sets of documents retrieved from the Scopus database were compared to what concerns the number of documents and citations, subject areas, and keywords: research documents addressing smart cities in general; research documents addressing local e-government; and research documents addressing smart cities in the scope of e-government. The study concludes that the relevance of smart cities within local e-government research has grown to represent about 20% of the number of documents published annually in the field, and that this contributed to broaden the range of subjects dealt with in the area. Moreover, it is observable a tendency towards the study of new areas of research related to the benefits and, generally, the consequences of smart cities development on service delivery and governance at the local level.