Can Digital Government Support Its Own Journal?
Yes, Says Extensive Survey by SUNY-Albany's Center for Technology in Government
By Karen Heyman
For the DGRC

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As the NSF Digital Government Research Program approaches its fifth annual conference, the multidisciplinary field has achieved substantial breadth and more than a modicum of maturity.

In light of this, Sharon Dawes, Director of the Center for Technology and Government at SUNY-Albany, received a grant last fall to conduct a survey to discover the desirability and feasibility of a journal specifically dedicated to the field of Digital Government.

Currently, the work of DG researchers appears in many different journals, in fields ranging from computer science to public policy to sociology. "Even though we knew it was a cross-disciplinary field, we were surprised by the number of journals people listed on the survey as the key journals in their fields," says Dawes.

Dawes and her students, Natalie Helbig and Ramon Gil-Garcia, surveyed 458 people. They included principal and co-investigators of all grants funded by the NSF/DG program, participants in the 2003 Digital Government Conference, and participants in the e-government clusters of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). They also reviewed the last five years' output of the top journals in public administration, public policy, and management information systems to identify authors who appeared to be doing DG research, and asked them to participate.

The results showed clearly one of the challenges of creating a new, multi-disciplinary field within traditional academic boundaries. More than half of the respondents said they had experienced difficulty identifying suitable traditional journals in which to publish. More than half also said that in order to be published, they had to "disaggregate" multidisciplinary research findings to fit the narrower focus of journals dedicated to existing disciplines. The awful paradox is that researchers have to dilute the great strength of their work to disseminate it; "They have to take apart that powerful set of multidisciplinary lenses in order to be published," says Dawes.

A serious corollary to that is the pressure on junior faculty members to publish in the well-established, prestigious journals of their own particular specialties. Although the survey did not ask respondents to indicate their tenure status, the raw data suggest there might such an be an effect: "About 87% said they would submit articles to a dedicated DG journal, but when we asked, ÔWould you submit your best work?' it dropped to 72%," says Dawes. "Although this is still a sizeable majority, I think what we might be seeing is the difference between those who have tenure and those who don't, because the rewards of tenure come from being recognized in your discipline."

Enthusiasm was clear, though - 80% of those surveyed by Dawes' team said they would be peer reviewers and 69% said they would be willing to serve on an editorial board.

But when asked the best way to promote the visibility, legitimacy, and influence of Digital Government research, respondents gave roughly equal endorsement to two strategies: create a new journal and organize special issues in the existing journals of their disciplines. "The traditional research disciplines are good places to air the ideas that are coming from Digital government researchers by publishing in special issues that really draw attention to the kind of work they are doing," says Dawes, "There was much less support for publishing individual articles in traditional journals, without the framework of a special issue."

In this respect, Digital Government may be going through the academic growth arc of any young field, going from subspecialty to specialty to full-fledged academic discipline. "10 or fifteen years ago, articles that looked at issues that we call e-commerce today showed up in management information systems literature, the broader specialty," says Dawes. Today there are entire journals devoted to e-commerce.

One thing that could make a Digital Government journal unique in the academic community is the strong agreement that the journal should have value for both academic researchers and government practitioners. "Digital Government research tends to contribute not just to academic knowledge, but also to the solution of real-world problems," says Dawes. Even so, the contributors to such a journal would likely be academics, since they would benefit the most professionally from publication.

Most encouragingly, people reported doing DG research in more than 30 countries and some are already working on similar journals in Europe. "Because it's such a global concern, we could be surprised by the number and kind of submissions that would come into a Digital Government journal," says Dawes, "This could extend far beyond the United States."

"The survey confirmed for me that there's a real community of Digital Government researchers; it's not just a collection of unconnected people who happen to work in the same broad area that we call Digital Government," concludes Dawes. The full results will be made public either in a session or a poster at the upcoming dg.o2004 - National Conference on Digital Government Research. In an irony that underscores the need for a journal, there's currently no obvious place to publish them (other than this newsletter).