Community Informatics: A bibliometric study of scholarly influence.

by Less, Anne M.

Community Informatics is both a study and a practice that seeks to facilitate socioeconomic empowerment through the use of Information and Communication Technologies, such as the Internet. As a developing area of interdisciplinary scholarship, Community Informatics has not yet been defined in academic terms. Using a bibliometric method, the intention of this study is to reveal the scholarly influences for this emerging area of academic scholarship. In order to examine the foundations of this scholarly community, this study evaluated citation patterns from the first year of publication of The Journal of Community Informatics, the sole and seminal peer-reviewed serial publication in this research area. The results of this study make an important and necessary contribution that will help to more accurately characterize the intellectual home for Community Informatics.