ICT for development: Unravelling key research themes using text mining

The field of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) has grown rapidly in the last two decades, spurred in part by the imperative to alleviate poverty and dispel inequities around the globe. The proliferation of technologies since the 2000s has accelerated scholarship and established mature research streams within the ICT4D domain. The objective of this research is to unravel themes that are latent in the enormous corpus of articles published during this time period. Specifically, we use text mining to elucidate the intellectual structure of ICT4D research published from 2000 to 2020. Our research clarifies what has been accomplished so far and what opportunities lie ahead. In addition to extracting dominant topics using a topic modeling algorithm called Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), our study synthesizes the findings to provide a concise representation of the various categories of research undertaken by ICT4D scholars. The study also articulates future areas of research that can extend the frontiers of knowledge pertinent to ICT4D and expedite our endeavors to overcome global challenges such as poverty, illiteracy, gender inequity, and other maladies that afflict underdeveloped and developing nations. Finally, this study makes a methodological contribution by illustrating the use of computational literature review in ICT4D.