Country Trends and Scholarly Collaboration in the ICT4D Research Community 2000-2013: A Single Journal Study

TLDR: The results of the study show that for this journal, single‐authored articles are cited more often than multi-authored articles in Google Scholar.

Abstract: The purpose of this study was to explore the country productivity, collaboration behaviour and citation impact of ICT4D researchers by examining all 378 articles published in the Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries (EJISDC) over a 14-year period. Data were collected from the Inspec database. The most active countries and regions were identified by analysing the author affiliation details. The contributions of developing countries were compared to developed countries. The trend in the EJISDC is towards collaborative research involving 250 (66.14%) articles with multiple authors and 128 (33.86%) articles with single authors.  Articles by authors from the same institution accounted for 32.01% of jointly authored articles. National or domestic collaboration accounted for 173 (45.77%) articles and international collaboration accounted for 77 (20.37%) articles. Of the 69 countries represented in the EJISDC, 51 countries collaborated globally. Regional distribution of authors showed that Africa had the strongest representation, followed by Asia and North America. Between 17.83% and 20.87% of developing countries contributed articles to the EJISDC. The results of the study show that for this journal, single-authored articles are cited more often than multi-authored articles in Google Scholar.