The paradigm of design science research: a tool-supported literature review

Abstract

In this paper, a review of the state of the art of theory associated with the young and quickly evolving Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm is presented. The core of the review consists of a structured literature search covering the senior scholars’ basket of eight from 1977 until the end of 2016, which resulted in data set of 196 sources. An iterative, selective coding of the title and abstracts revealed four major grounded clusters (138 papers). Three clusters (93 papers) were selected for co-citation analysis and augmented with additional forward and backward searches. The co-citation analysis affords an objective look at the current state of theory use in DSR and allows for the systematic identification of research opportunities. Altogether, the paper presents a multi-grounded DSR approach to literature reviews and contributes a reliable platform for further analysis and development of the DSR paradigm