[From the article “Assessing citizen adoption of e-government initiatives in Gambia: A validation of the technology acceptance model in information systems success. A critical article review, with questions to its publishers” by Daniel Jung, published in Government Information Quarterly]

“The article is on Elsevier’s list of most cited articles from the Government Information Quarterly journal, and has become a key reference in the field of study, with nearly 250 citations (in Google scholar). However, it completely fails when it comes to overall linguistic expression, literature review, grounding in the field, citation practice, questionnaire design, data collection, rendering and interpreting others’ and own data, calculation, claims of user-centeredness and accounting for cultural differences, and the final assertion that all this leads to Gambia benefiting from TAM.”

“Its premise and findings are blatantly wrong: they are not valid, reliable, verifiable or reproducible in any way. No single part could be changed to achieve integrity, and for proper results, everything would have to be redone, starting with the questionnaire design, and ending with the conclusion.”

“This article is as close to a scientific hoax as one can possibly come, but I believe that it is just an unfortunate case of poor science, not a deliberate fraud as such, even if the Zambia/Gambia quote is hard to excuse as unintentional. In any case, this is an article that should obviously never have been published, and raises serious questions about the editorial rigor, the quality of the peer reviewing, and the revision process in the journal.”

To read the article, click here.