Systematic mapping study of information communication technology research for agriculture (in case of developing Countries)

Context: A rural community in a developing country is a socially complex and
infrastructural weak environment that demands clear understanding of the social, economical, cultural, and political precondition before implementing information commutation technology (ICT) innovations.
Objective: This work aims to conduct a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS) to get an in-depth understanding about ICT based researches for agriculture in developing countries.
Method: A systematic mapping study was carried out to investigate and distill the state-of-the-art from ranked journals and conference publications. In doing so, data extraction task was carried out using fifteen variables. Eg. What kinds of research challenges and contributions were reported to design ICTs based solutions? Which disciplines (knowledge areas) were most explored?
Result: ICT in agriculture has gained attention over the past few years with number of contributions but still there is long ways to go. The review shows that currently there are limited knowledge areas in methods, user interface design, and theory in how to design information system for rural community settings.
Conclusion: This paper first presents an overview of research topics and trends from selected top ranked ICT4D Journals and conference proceedings. Second, the detailed explanation about the proposed and/ or used frameworks, theoretical underpinning, methods and Technology used were discussed, among others. Third, the paper also motivates others researchers for an ongoing discourse to fill identified gaps from software engineering, computer science or information system research perspective.

Keywords: design method, information system, development, agriculture.