ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sustain. Cities
Sec. Innovation and Governance
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frsc.2025.1605180
Social infrastructure service delivery in South Africa: A bibliometric, visualization, and thematic analysis
Provisionally accepted
- Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
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This study conducted a bibliometric analysis of social infrastructure service delivery research in South Africa, using 69 Scopus-indexed journal articles published between 1994 and 2024. In the analysis of the bibliometric data, biblioshiny, VOSviewer, and Microsoft Excel were adopted to analyse publication trends, prolific authors, and thematic developments in the field. The first Scopus-indexed article appeared in 1999, with publication rates showing modest growth in the first decade (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009), followed by significant acceleration, increasing by over 200% between 2010-2019. Citation analysis revealed a consistent impact across publications, with notable peaks in 2010 and 2020. Leading contributors include Akinboade OA., Mokwena MP., and Maramura TC. Their studies focused on citizen satisfaction, service delivery protests, and public service reform. Key research themes encompassed water policy and infrastructure, citizen participation in service delivery, public service innovation, and informal settlement services. The study identified research gaps in public service inclusion for disadvantaged groups and citizen roles in infrastructure maintenance. The analysis demonstrates that while research in this field has grown since South Africa's post-apartheid transition, certain critical areas remain underexplored. Despite being limited to Scopus-indexed articles, the study provides valuable insights into the evolution and current state of social infrastructure service delivery research in South Africa. The findings help eliminate complexity in understanding the literature landscape and establish a foundation for future research directions in this field.
Keywords: social infrastructure, Service delivery, Citizen-centric, South Africa, bibliometric analysis
Received: 02 Apr 2025; Accepted: 29 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mashabela, Gumbo and Ishola. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Abdulrasaq Ajadi Ishola, Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
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