Abstract:

Since the largescale development in the late 1990s, Community Informatics(CI) has gradually become a hot field of interdisciplinary research, which covers sociology, computer science, information science and so on. By reviewing the research on community informatics, this paper aims to interpret “what is CI”, “who are the researchers”, and “what has been done”. The relevant results are presented with the methods of bibliometric analysis and comparison analysis, as well as deep reading. The results of this study comprise of three parts: firstly, the productive authors and influential academic cooperative groups have been found in the field of Community Informatics domestic and abroad. There is a big difference between domestic and foreign authors according to their academic backgrounds. Moreover, cooperation is mainly carried out within the same agency, whereas there is still a tendency of crossagency cooperation. Secondly, there are five research themes on CI , including “ICT access”, “community information services”, “digital poverty and inequality”, “social network” and “social capital”. Thirdly, with the clue of time, the paper reveals development venation of CI, and a group of important literature have been found. The results will help us to know the progress and to trace the development direction of CI, so as to provide reference for further research.

Keywords: Community informatics, Subject background, Research subject, Research theme, Development venation