Digital Government Reference Library

The Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL) aims to be an indispensable, open-access tool in the field of digital government. Peter Parycek, Gabriela Viale Pereira and Jochen Scholl act as co-chief editors, while Andrea Chapman is responsible for curation, and Lörinc Thurnay provides technical assistance. The DGRL is supported and updated in cooperation with the DGRL Committee of the Digital Government Society, which for the period of 2024-2025 is comprised of Gabriela Viale Pereira, Edimara Luciano, Gabriel Puron Cid, and Jochen Scholl. 

Citation: Scholl, H. J. (2024). The Digital Government Reference Library (DGRL). Versions 20.0—20.5. Retrieved from https://dgrl.donau-uni.ac.at

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Version 20.0 of the DGRL was published on June 13, 2024. The library now contains 19,932 references to predominantly English-language, peer-reviewed work in the domains of digital government, digital governance, and digital democracy. 

This marks a 2.8% increase in references from version 19.5 (December 2023) and a 6.8% increase from version 19.0 (June 2023) This substantial growth demonstrates the continued relevance and expansion of Digital Government-related publishing, adding another 4-digit number (1,264) of new peer-reviewed academic references within the past 12 months. 

BibTeX, RIS, and Endnote (package) versions are available as a zip file. Mendeley or Zotero versions can easily be created by importing from RIS or BibTeX files. Please contact us at dgrl@donau-uni.ac.at in case of any errors or omissions. The next scheduled update is December 15, 2024. Thank you for your interest and cooperation. 

The purpose of the DGRL is to improve the quality of academic research in digital government by identifying and capturing a wide range of relevant peer-reviewed, publications in the English language, produced by authors worldwide. The goal is to provide authors and reviewers in the multi-disciplinary study domain of Digital Government Research access to the body of current academic knowledge, provide keyword searches to inform research better and provide accuracy and reliability in citations. In doing so, the DGRL aims to improve the use of this knowledge relative to digital government and have a formative effect on the Digital Government Research domain moving forward. 

Launched in 2005 to create and maintain a comprehensive reference library dedicated to academic digital government literature, the DGRL was hosted by the University of Washington until September 2024, when it was handed over to the Center for E-Governance at the University for Continuing Education Krems.  

Initially, the project started with references from a review of the literature and later established criteria for including an article or paper. From its first public release in 2006 under the name of Electronic Government Reference Library (or EGRL), the number of entries in the reference library has proliferated from the initial two hundred to thousands of references.  

With the release of version 14.0 in June of 2018, the reference library surpassed 10,000 references. This event also marked the reference library's renaming as "Digital Government Reference Library," following a worldwide trend of referring to the study discipline. Since the introduction of the DGRL in 2005, the volume of recorded academic knowledge in e-government has grown more than tenfold. 

We estimate that the references in DGRL represent more than 90 percent of the extant peer-reviewed, English-language literature in DG research. If you believe a reference is missing from the DGRL, we encourage you to check that it meets all the required criteria for inclusion. If it does, please send an email with the reference information to dgrl@donau-uni.ac.at. Your contribution will help us maintain the completeness and accuracy of the DGRL. 

Criteria for inclusion in the DGRL 

At a minimum, a paper or article must: 

• Have passed an academic peer review process, 

• Be published in the proceedings of an academic conference or in an academic journal, 

• Be published in English (or, if published in another language, an English-language translation must be publicly available), 

• Be at least seven pages (or equivalently, 3,700 words) in length (including references) for a non-technical article, 

• Be at least four pages (2,250 words) in length (including references) for a technical article. 

Search Terms 

We search the Library of Congress, LISTA, Web of Science, and Google Scholar with the following search terms*. 

*Also Spelling and acronym variations 

Core Conferences 

• Government Information Quarterly (GIQ) 

• Information Polity (IP) 

• International Journal of Electronic Government Research (IJEGR) 

• International Journal of Public Administration in the Digital Age (IJPADA) 

• Transforming Government: People, Process and Policy (TGPPP) 

• ACM Digital Government: Research and Practice (DGOV) 

• The eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government (JeDEM) 

• Journal of Information Technology & Politics (JITP) 

• Electronic Government, an International Journal (EGaIJ) 

• Electronic Journal of Electronic Government (EJEG) 

Core Conferences 

• HICSS (Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - Digital Government Track) 

• IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-ePart (International Federation for Information Processing WG 8.5) 

• dg.o (Digital Government Society) 

• ICEGOV (International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance)