Focal fields in literature on the information divide. The USA, China, UK and India

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JD-02-2019-0032
Date30 August 2019
Published date30 August 2019
Pages373-388
AuthorFeng Yang,Xiaoqian Zhang
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet
Focal fields in literature on
the information divide
The USA, China, UK and India
Feng Yang and Xiaoqian Zhang
Sichuan University, Chengdu, China
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify key countries and their focal research fields on the
information divide.
Design/methodology/approach Literaturewas retrieved to identifykey countries and their primaryfocus.
The literature research method was adopted to identify aspects of the primary focusin each key country.
Findings The key countries with literature on the information divide are the USA, China, the UK and India.
The problem of health is prominent in the USA, and solutions include providing information, distinguishing
usersprofiles and improving eHealth literacy. Economic and political factors led to the urbanrural
information divide in China, and policy is the most powerful solution. Under the influence of humanism,
research on the information divide in the UK focuses on all age groups, and solutions differ according to
age. Deep-rooted patriarchal concepts and traditional marriage customs make the gender information divide
prominent in India, and increasing womens information consciousness is a feasible way to reduce this divide.
Originality/value This paper is an extensive review study on the information divide, which clarifies
the key countries and their focal fields in research on this topic. More important, the paper innovatively
analyzes and summarizes existing literature from a country perspective.
Keywords China, India, Information society, The USA, Information divide, The UK
Paper type Literature review
1. Introduction
Countriesare moving from industrial to informationsocieties at differentspeeds. For example,
Luxembourg has entered the advanced stage of being an information society; countries such
as Switzerland,Finland and Norway are in the intermediate stage; andEstonia and Israel are
in the primary stage. However, Romania, China, India, South Africa and so on have not yet
entered the information society stage (DIID, 2017) . Just as there are differenc es between
countries in terms of transitioning to an information society, the information divide –“the
state of social division between those who are favorably placed in information resource
distributionand those who are not(Yu, 2006) varies betweencountries under the combined
effects of economic development, h istory, culture and society. Today, countries must
understand and resolve the information divide based on national conditions if they intend to
ensure that no people will be abandoned in the information society.
Numerous studies over an extended period have discussed the information divide. The
original research adopting the information divide as a keyword can be traced to the 1960s
(Yu, 2006) or earlier if broadly considering the term information divide (such as knowledge
divide, education divide, literacy divide and the information behavior of socially vulnerable
groups) (Childers and Post, 1975). Some literature reviews have appeared since, which can
be summarized as follows: bibliometric analyses of external characteristics (time,
organization, country, etc.) of the literature (Kolle, 2017), understanding of basic concepts
related to the information divide (Lievrouw and Farb, 2003; Yu, 2006; Barzilai-Nahon, 2006;
Van Deursen and Van Dijk, 2015) and exploration of information behavior or the
information world of the information poor (Childers and Post, 1975; Renahy and Chauvin,
2006). However, few studies have noted the differences in focal fields between countries.
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 76 No. 2, 2020
pp. 373-388
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-02-2019-0032
Received 19 February 2019
Revised 8 July 2019
Accepted 14 July 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
This research was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, Grant No. 17BTQ032.
373
Literature
on the
information
divide
Even though studies have described the differences between countries in the construction of
information infrastructure, access to information and speed of digitalization (Cullen, 2001;
Corrocher and Ordanini, 2002; Çilan et al., 2009; Seo and Thorson, 2016; Kathuria and Oh,
2018), these descriptions are vague and general. Therefore, it is necessary to examine related
literature to determine key countries and their focal research fields within studies on the
information divide. In short, the paper reviews related literature from the perspective of
countries and addresses the following questions:
RQ1. Which countries do the literature on the information divide focus on?
RQ2. Which field is the primary focus in each country?
RQ3. From what aspects does the literature discuss these fields?
2. Methods
This researchwas a review of studies on the informationdivide based on literature published
in the Web of Science Core Collection. Literature was collected through three indexes in the
Web of Science Core Collection Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Social Sciences
Citation Index(SSCI) and Arts & HumanitiesCitation Index (A&HCI) becausethey include a
collection of 11,655 peer-reviewed, high-quality scholarly journals published worldwide in
over 234 science, social sciences and humanities disciplines (Minnick, 2018). As mentioned,
the informationdivide is a state of social division, andvarious terms have been used to define
this differentiated state including information/digital inequality, information/digital divide,
information/digital gap, information/digital differentiation and information disparity.Several
terms that describe those who appear on the right/wrong side of the divide also exist. People
on the right side aredefined as information rich or the information haves, while those on the
wrong side are described as being in information poverty, being information poor, and as
the information have-nots. Therefore, a title search (TS) was conducted in SCIE, SSCI and
A&HCI in the Web of ScienceCore Collection using the above terms.During the search, some
articles about information gap decision theory (IGDT) were retrieved. However, IGDT is
employed for modeling and managing deep uncertainty in human affairs (Ben-Haim, 2006),
and was thus rejected. Ultimately,this research was conductedthrough the following research
strategy on September 26, 2018.
TS ¼(information inequalityOR digital inequalityOR information divide*OR
digital divide*OR information gap*OR divide gap*OR information differentiation
OR digital differentiationOR information disparityOR information povertyOR
information poorOR information richOR information have*OR information
have-not*OR information disadvantaged) NOT TS ¼(information gap decision theor*
OR IGDT) AND LANGUAGE ¼English AND DOCUMENT TYPES ¼Article AND
Indexes ¼SCI-EXPANDED, SSCI, A&HCI AND Timespan ¼All years.
A full record for each of the 4,388 publications was obtained. Titles, authors, keywords,
references and so on were extracted and saved in a text format to be analyzed by Bicomb2
(a bibliographicitems co-occurrence matrixbuilder) to calculate the frequency of each country
listed in the keywords.According to the statistics, fourcountries (the USA, China, the UK and
India) were frequently included in the literature and were identified as key countries.
To identify the primary focus in each country, other retrievals (Table I) were performed.
Bibliographic records including titles, abstracts and so on in each data set were downloaded
to identify the primary issues these articles focused on. At the same time, since keywords
are words describing the contents of a document, the keywords in each data set were
classified and counted by Bicomb2 and visualized by CiteSpaceV to identify the primary
focus in each country. To make sure the quality of keywords, the names of countries and
common keywords discussed in all countries (such as the digital divide, inequality, the
374
JD
76,2

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT