Towards Interdisciplinary Research: A Bibliometric View of Information Communication Technology for Development in Different Disciplines

We present a novel bibliometric view to create a taxonomy of the interdisciplinary field of Information Communication Technology for Development (ICTD or ICT4D), using scientific documents published in the fields related to information communication technologies that were indexed in the Scopus database from 2001 to 2015. Our research approach utilizes a set of relevant terms and venues (journals and conferences) to procure publications on ICTD topics, and further to analyze them statistically to identify emerging or emerged sub-disciplines. The sub-disciplines prominently include Economic Growth/E-Government/Political Economy, Cloud Enterprises/Entrepreneurship/ICT Innovation, and Smart Energy/Smart Grid. We identify the relevance and uniqueness of all ICTD topics, generated by the algorithm, by employing well-known indices of the coherence coefficient and Kullback-Leibler divergence, indicating the qualifications of a given topic as an established sub-discipline of ICTD. This paper attempts to discuss the interdisciplinary nature of the research field ICTD and recommends prospective directions for new subdisciplines based on the text analysis.