DIGITAL OBSERVATORIES AND SOCIAL PARTICIPATION

A STUDY IN WEB OF SCIENCE AND SCOPUS

Abstract

Digital observatories constitute sociotechnical infrastructures designed for the production, organization, monitoring, and use of information, and may support participatory processes and decision-making. This study analyzes the temporal evolution and thematic structure of the literature on social participation in digital observatories from 2016 to 2025, adopting territorial intelligence as an analytical perspective. It is a descriptive bibliometric study based on records retrieved from the Web of Science and Scopus databases. The corpus comprised 652 articles analyzed using the Bibliometrix package and the Biblioshiny interface. The results show growth in the number of publications over the period analyzed and reveal four thematic clusters: data science and computational infrastructure; citizen science, participation, and governance; digital systems and monitoring; and public health and epidemiology. As an interpretive contribution, these clusters were examined through the lens of territorial intelligence, highlighting relationships among information production and management, technological resources, governance, knowledge mobilization, and the involvement of social actors. The findings indicate that the literature connects digital technologies, collaborative practices, and information processes across different observation and monitoring contexts, pointing to relevant relationships with the production of territorial intelligence.