# A Review of Digital Era Governance Research in the First Two Decades: A Bibliometric Study
## 3 Materials and Methods  
Bibliometric data on DEG research were extracted from Scopus on 9 November 2021, a world-leading bibliographic database of peer-reviewed literature. The selection of Scopus was founded on the fact that it is a larger database compared with other competitive databases such as Web of Science [39]. This was confined by the initial search in both databases, whereby Scopus returned more relevant documents than Web of Science. When compared to the Scopus database, Web of Science has also been identified as a database that significantly underrepresents scientific disciplines of the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities [40]. Consequently, the Scopus database appears to be more relevant and meets the demands of the bibliometric analysis of DEG research. In order to capture all specifics of DEG research, the search query, used in the advanced online search engine, included a broad range of keywords related to DEG, identified in the extensive literature review of existing bibliometric studies in this research area, whereby the terms _digital_ and _electronic_ were used interchangeably and thus considered as synonyms since there is still no formal consensus on the distinction between these terms by academics, practitioners and policymakers [20]. Accordingly, in this paper, DEG is considered an umbrella term, including e-government, e-governance and other digital or smart government or governance incentives aimed at modernizing and digitalizing governance in public administration on state and local levels. Hence, the search query covered the following DEG-related keywords: \"digital era government\", \"digital-era government\", \"digital government\", \"government\", \"gevornment\", \"electronic government\", \"smart government\", \"open government\", \"digital era governance\", \"digital-era governance\", \"digital governance\", \"e-governance\", \"egovernance\", \"electronic governance\", \"smart governance\" and \"open governance\". The selected keywords are consistent with different digital government transformation concepts and general evolution of e-government discourse [9]. The search, i.e., identification of documents, was limited to articles, conference papers, reviews and conference reviews in the English language published between 1 January 2001 and 31 December 2020. These features were applied in a multi-step search process. First, the search was set to include the title, abstract and keywords and focused only on the subject area of Social Sciences. Further, the same keyword search was extended to other selected relevant sources (journals and conference proceedings) not covered within the subject area of Social Sciences, i.e., Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL), which is the greatest comprehensive bibliographic database on digital or electronic government [25; 41]. Third, other relevant documents were identified by setting the keyword search to include the title only, excluding all previous limitations on the subject area of Social Sciences or selected relevant sources. After the screening process, the eligibility was finally conducted by manual examination of documents. According to the presented multiphase process (see Figure 1), 9175 documents were identified in Scopus as being relevant for DEG research. After all of the relevant bibliometric data on DEG research had been obtained from Scopus, various bibliometric approaches and software tools were applied. The schema of the bibliometric analysis is shown in Figure 2. As regards the descriptive overview, the descriptive statistics were extracted and calculated with the Biblioshiny application [42; 43], while frequency analysis was performed using the Python Data Analysis Library Pandas [44] and visualized using Python's visualization library Matplotlib [45]. These Python libraries were also used to examine the scientific production of the most relevant countries, sources and authors.