E-participation as a Research Area: A Bibliometric Analysis

The study aims to promote a better understanding of the literature in the field of e-participation, as well as to demonstrate the possibility of using software designed for automated processing of information arrays downloaded from bibliographic databases for scientometric analysis of such a complex interdisciplinary research area as e-participation. A descriptive analysis of publications and authors was conducted to identify the areas of knowledge in which the concept of e-participation is involved; the conceptual structure of the research area was analyzed using bibliometric tools, which allows creating a map of the most important topics studied. Based on this, the author suggests future research directions. A total of 1946 publications from the Scopus citation database for the period 1968–2022 were analyzed. The results indicated the possibility of effectively using the functionality of the software for analyzing interdisciplinary trends in world science. The author concludes that this research area has reached the point of "maturity". The number of publications is growing, but not at such an explosive rate as it was 10-15 years ago. New journals are appearing, their quartiles are growing, the share of publications of conference proceedings is decreasing (with an increase in the number of journal articles), which indicates an increase in the quality of research.