The Evolution of E-Voting Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Paper voting has many inefficiencies, so in a world where digital tech- nology is becoming increasingly pervasive in our daily lives, many researchers are focusing on projects concerning the design, implementation and adoption of electronic voting in different fields and contexts. Specifically, an increasing num- ber of papers have been published in the last ten years. Some papers study the experiences developed in specific countries, and others discuss solutions based on a particular technology, such as blockchain, whose characteristics are partic- ularly relevant for implementing a digital voting system. To this end, we have extracted 1451 articles from the Scopus database to create the initial dataset on which we performed a bibliometric analysis. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to quantitatively describe the existing research on the subject and its evolution, and (2) to identify principles that characterize the discussion on e-voting through a co-word analysis. The results provide an overview of the field and insights for future research and practical implementation.