The Current Research Landscape on the Person with Disabilities (PWDs) Accessibilities on Digital Government: A Bibliometric Analysis

Digital government has become an increasingly important area of research due to its potential to provide public value through enhancing accessibility to information, transparency, and public service delivery. Despite its growing popularity, the adoption and implementation of digital government face challenges, and literature discussing these issues is abundant. However, little research has been done to investigate the accessibility of digital government literature for persons with disabilities (PWDs) in the online Scopus database. This study utilizes bibliometric analysis to provide an overview of the current research landscape on PWDs' accessibility to digital government. The methodology involves a keyword search of the Scopus online database, with 356 documents selected for further analysis, and standard bibliometric indicators used to report the documents' profiles. The study includes a discussion of document and source types, language of publication, subject area, research trends, distribution of publications by countries, most active source title, citation analysis, top 20 highly cited articles, keywords, and visualization maps. The findings of the study indicate a growing body of literature on PWDs and digital government, with the highest number of publications in 2021. The United States is the largest contributor to PWDs and digital government research, and the most active source title for digital government research is the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. The most highly cited article is "The impact of policies on government social media usage: Issues, challenges,


Introduction
The terms e-government and digital government are often used interchangeably to describe the use of technology, specifically information and communication technologies (ICTs), in the delivery of government services and information to citizens. The term "digital government" refers to the use of digital technologies to provide public value as an integral aspect of modernization efforts for governments (OECD, 2014). It is dependent on a digital government ecosystem made up of individuals, corporations, citizens' associations, non-governmental organizations, and government entities that facilitates the creation of and access to data, services, and content through interactions with the government.
The primary goal of digital government is to increase citizen engagement and participation in the democratic process, making it more accessible for all individuals regardless of their physical, cognitive, or socio-economic status. It aims to improve the accessibility, transparency, and efficiency of government services and information, and promote citizen engagement and participation in the democratic process. Digital government initiatives can also enhance the efficiency of government services, reducing costs and wait times for citizens (Bertot et al., 2010).
While digital government initiatives can foster better user-government contact and boost transparency (Alghamdi and Beloff, 2014), a thorough performance assessment is crucial for digital government programme success as it provides insight into how certain projects affect various stakeholders, such as citizens, government workers, businesses, and minorities. In many nations, particularly developing nations, user uptake and usage are far from ideal, and this could result in the failure of digital government, wasting resources and money in the process.
An ample amount of evidence is available discussing the barriers to digital government adoption and initiatives. Of the many barriers or challenges mentioned, digital inclusion is a recurring theme. Most of the exiting digital government research does not focus or discuss person with disabilities (PWDs) considerations for digital government services. In accordance with the Persons with Disabilities Act 2008 (PWD), "PWD, encompass those who suffer from long term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments, preventing their full and effective participation in society when faced with challenges." 'Disability' is a broad term which can refer to many different varieties and degrees of impairment, whether they relate to vision, hearing, speech, mobility, cognition, or psychosocial factors. Following the coronavirus pandemic, when having internet connectivity became essential, digital accessibility increased, but only for those who were physically well and had all five senses intact. However, individuals with disabilities (PWDs) have had to contend with digital tools that do not see them as users, leaving them in the all-too-familiar position of being excluded. There has been a sharp rise in the number of studies about digital government that have been found in a variety of publications, which has drawn the attention of academics and researchers around the world. The literature on electronic government has been extensively researched and evaluated with a diversity of objectives in view (Heeks & Bailur, 2007;Yildiz, 2007). However, Ahmi and Mohamad (2018) claimed that there are relatively limited attempts to examine the trend of prior works on web accessibility using a bibliometric approach. Napitupulu (2021) asserts that throughout the last ten years, there has been little to no bibliometric evaluation of e-government research as a whole.  Table 1's bibliometric description of publications on digital government in the Scopus database, there is no bibliometric study that investigates the trend of PWDs' accessibility of digital government research in the online Scopus database. In contrast to the above studies mentioned, this one takes a novel outlook by using bibliometric analysis to examine the accessibility trend for people with disabilities (PWDs) in digital government research. The accessibility of digital governance for people with disabilities (PWDs) has some shortcomings that need to be taken into account. Access, equity, and inclusion of PWDs should be taken into account as the government and society embrace digitization, in line with the creation of the ASEAN Enabling Masterplan 2025: Mainstreaming the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (the Enabling Masterplan). Therefore, it is crucial to comprehend past research as well as research gaps in the existing body of literature to provide the future research of the PWDs accessibility on digital government.
The study sought to accomplish the specific objective which are to discover • To identify the subject areas or disciplines that contribute to PWDs accessibility on digital government research. • To identify the trend of PWDs accessibility on digital government research based on the number of publications per year. • To identify the countries of authors that contribute the most to the publication in digital government research. • To identify the most active source title that contributes to PWDs accessibility on digital government research.
This study takes on a different perspective by examining the publications trends, its contributions and future research directions. In addition to this, this study is structured as follows: The second section describes the methodology used in this study. Section 3 summarizes the study's main findings. Section 4 discusses the contributions. Section 5 concludes with future research recommendations for researchers.

Data Source
This bibliometric study utilized the scientific database Scopus to conduct an analysis of publications containing the terms "digital government," "e-government," "government," OR "electronic government" in the title, abstract, or keywords. The study examined all types of papers published in the Scopus database between 2003 and 2021 to provide a comprehensive perspective on the world's research output. Scopus is widely regarded as one of the primary sources of relevant information in the international scientific community, given its status as one of the most important sources of essential data. The study employed bibliometric analysis, which according to Zupic and Cater (2015), involves a quantitative and statistical evaluation of published studies, and is commonly used as a method of conducting a literature review.

Defining Keywords
This research was performed on September 25, 2022, using keywords in the form of search strings relevant to digital government and PWDs where keywords are searched based on the title, keywords, and abstract of the article as follows: ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "digital government" OR "e-government" OR "egovernment" OR "electronic government" ) ) AND ( disabilities ).

Search Strategy
This study gathers a collection of materials published in digital government using the online Scopus database. Due to its reputation as the largest citation and abstract database in technology, social science, business, and management, Scopus online database was chosen for this study.

Refinement of Search Result
After obtaining the initial results, then researchers conducted a screening of all articles based on the exclusion criteria determined in this research. There are two (2) exclusion criteria used to screen the search results: (i) year 2022 (ii) discontinued coverage in Scopus. The frequency and percentage of the published materials were calculated using Microsoft Excel 2013 to produce the pertinent charts and graphs; the bibliometric networks were created and visualized using VOSviewer (version 1.6.15); and the citation metrics were calculated using Harzing's Publish and Perish software. Table 2 summarizes the amount of all articles obtained after the refinement process. ( TITLE-ABS-KEY ( "digital government" OR "egovernment" OR "egovernment" OR "electronic government" ) ) AND ( disabilities ) AND ( EXCLUDE ( PUBYEAR , 2022 ) )

Results
The analysis for the extracted academic work in the search process was based on the following attributes: document and source types, languages of documents, subject area, year of publication, top 10 countries contributed to the publication, most active source titles, citation metrics, top 20 highly cited articles, and keywords analysis.  Table 3 presents ten document types. The highest represented type of document is an article with 152 (42.70%), followed by a conference paper with 136 (38.20%). Book chapters also contribute a quite significant number of documents, represented by 43 (12.08 %). Other types of documents with below than 10 publications are book with 9 publications (2.53%), conference review, 6 (1.69%), review, 6 (1.69%) and editorial, 2 (0.56%). The lowest contribution is from note with 1 publication (0.28%). Meanwhile, as Table 4 shows, the documents are classified into four different source types of which the journal represents the highest type of source with 161 documents (45.22%), followed by conference proceedings with 118 documents (33.15%). Books contributed 50 documents (14.04%), and the lowest contribution was from book series with 27 documents (7.58%).  100.00 *one document has been prepared in dual languages This paper next classifies the published documents based on the subject area as summarized in Table 6. As reported, about 40.45% of the documents examined are from the computer science field, followed by social sciences (29.34%) and business, management and accounting (6.94%). Other subject areas that below 5% of the total publication are mathematics (4.86%), decision sciences (4.34%), engineering (4.17%), economics, econometrics and finance (2.08%), medicine (1.91%), and arts and humanities (1.74%). The distribution indicates that research on digital government also emerged in other subject areas including physics and astronomy, chemical engineering, neuroscience and psychology with little percentage of publications.   This study also presents the most active countries that contributed to the publications. Table  8 listed the most active countries with the United States listed as the highest rank with the 78 publications. The United Kingdom and Spain contributed 26 and 23 publications respectively followed by Australia with 22 publications. Brazil and Germany are the countries that contributed to the publications of PWDs and digital government with 16 publications. Among countries with below than 15 publications are Canada (12), Malaysia (12), Greece (11) and South Africa (11). Notes: TP=total number of publications; %= percentage of publication; NCP=number of cited publications; TC=total citations; C/P=average citations per publication; C/CP=average citations per cited publication; h=h-index; and g=g-index. Table 9 highlighted the most active source title on PWDs and digital government. As shown in Table 9, the ACM International Conference Proceeding Series is among the top source titles that contribute 30 publications and ACM is the highest publisher contributing to the publication in Scopus.

Keywords Analysis
The present study employed VOSviewer to conduct network visualization analysis of author keywords. Figure 3 depicts a network visualization of the author keywords, where attributes such as color, circle size, font size, and thickness of connecting lines were utilized to represent their relationship with other keywords. The analysis revealed the presence of seven clusters in Scopus, which were developed based on the author keywords. The first cluster, which is colored in red, consists of 19 keywords such as items such as accessibility, accessibility evaluation, accessibility guidelines, accessibility problems, assistive technology, persons with disabilities, and regulatory compliance. The second cluster, which is colored in green, consists of 13 keywords. These include design, e-learning, electronic commerce, government data processing and government information. The third cluster is in blue colour and includes 12 keywords such as adoption, article, case study, decision making, digital government, evaluation, government and human. The fourth cluster which is colored in yellow consists of 12 keywords. These include developing countries, digital divide, digital government adoption, economic and social effects, health care and information services. Cluster five consists of 7 keywords and some of them were digital transformation, government services, public administration, public sector, public services and quality of service. Cluster six consists of 3 keywords which are digital governance, e-participation and local government. The same goes to cluster seven, it also consists of 3 keywords such as public policy, social media and transparency. Researchers also analyzed the keyword in the spreadsheet document to count the total number of occurrences. Prior to it, data on keywords had been harmonized to ensure consistency in usage. For example, "people with disabilities" and "persons with disabilities" were combined as it represents a similar meaning. Based on the number of occurrences (after conducting data cleaning on the keywords), keywords such as digital government were encountered as the most used keywords in the PWDs and digital government study. Table 12 shows the top 20 keywords in bibliometric search. digital government (62.74%), government data processing (24.93%), websites (20.00%), persons with disabilities (pwds) (17.26%), accessibility (15.07%) and website accessibility (12.60%) are among the keywords with the highest occurrences in Scopus (more than 10.00%). Other keywords with below than 10.00% are information systems, usability, information services, public administration, transportation and web content accessibility guidelines.  (2012) titled "The impact of policies on government social media usage: Issues, challenges, and recommendations."

Conclusion
As governments continue to modernize and embrace digital technologies, it is imperative that they prioritize accessibility for all citizens, including those with disabilities. This can be achieved through the development of inclusive digital government strategies and policies, as well as ensuring that all digital platforms and services are designed with accessibility in mind, following established accessibility guidelines and standards. Moreover, governments must also provide appropriate training and resources to government employees involved in the development and implementation of digital services, to ensure that accessibility considerations are fully integrated into their work processes and decision-making. By doing so, governments can ensure that all citizens have equal access to the benefits of digital government and promote greater social inclusion for people with disabilities.
This study highlights the need for continued research and attention to PWD accessibility in digital government, as well as the importance of ongoing efforts to promote disabilityinclusive policies and practices in all areas of society. In conclusion, this study provides valuable insights into the growing importance of PWD accessibility in digital government and underscores the need for continued efforts to promote greater accessibility and inclusion for people with disabilities in all aspects of society.
Overall, despite these limitations, this study provides valuable insights into the current state of research on PWD accessibility in digital government and highlights important areas for future research and policy development. Researchers believe that continued research and policy development in this area is crucial to ensuring that digital government initiatives are inclusive and accessible for all members of society, especially those with disabilities. This will ultimately lead to a more equitable society where PWDs have equal access to information and services provided by digital government initiative and to work towards removing barriers that prevent equal access for all individuals.