An overview of decision table literature.

The present report contains an overview of the literature on decision tables since its origin. The goal is to analyze the dissemination of decision tables in different areas of knowledge, countries and languages, especially showing these that present the most interest on decision table use. In the first part a description of the scope of the overview is given. Next, the classification results by topic are explained. An abstract and some keywords are included for each reference, normally provided by the authors. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. Other examined topics are the theoretical or practical feature of each document, as well as its origin country and language. Finally, the main body of the paper consists of the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.

Collaboration and Author Order: Changing Patterns in IS Research

In this article we examine changes in the patterns of collaboration among information systems researchers since 1987, in terms of number of authors and order of authorship. The proportion of multiple authored papers, particularly among articles published in more prestigious journals, increased significantly. One possible explanation may be in increased research complexity, as evidenced by much longer papers. At the same time, among prestigious journals, the alphabetical model for ordering authorship all but disappeared. The article calls for consideration of a standard for authorship order in IS research

Retrieving with good sense

Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval

A Review of the Literature on the Empathy Construct Using Cluster Analysis

Empathy plays a central role in human behavior and is a key aspect of social functioning. The extensive research on the empathy construct in fields such as psychology, social work, and education has revealed many positive aspects of empathy. Through the use of cluster analysis, this research takes a new approach to reviewing the literature on empathy and objectively identifies groups of empathy research. Next, this study relates the information systems (IS) discipline’s focus on empathy research through the projection of IS empathy paragraphs into those clusters, and identifies areas of empathy research that are currently being largely overlooked by the IS field. The use of cluster analysis and projection for conducting a literature review provides researchers with a more objective approach for reviewing relevant literature

A Historiographical Examination of Information Systems

As the Information Systems (IS) field enters its fourth decade of evolution, the time is right to provide a historiographical examination of this discipline. Methodological and thematic trends are gauged through a quarterly analysis of 2098 IS articles published in eight leading journals and the ICIS Proceedings in the 12-year period between 1985-1996. The results of this study show that significant changes occurred in research strategies and themes employed by IS researchers. Even though a large proportion of IS studies are still non-empirical, we see significant upward trend in the proportion of empirical studies. The reliance on reference disciplines increased significantly over the years. Similarly, we see significantly increasing trends in organizational, environmental and educational themes. In contrast, technical issues show decreasing trends. The paper calls for collective efforts to unify knowledge necessary for progress of IS as a scientific field of inquiry

A Scientometric Investigation into the Validity of IS Journal Quality Measures

In this study we investigated the measurement validity of the findings in the IS journal quality stream over the past ten years. Our evaluation applied a series of validation tests to the metrics presented in these studies using data from multiple sources. The results of our tests for content, convergent, and discriminant validity, as well as those for parallel-form, test-retest, and item-to-total reliability, were highly supportive. From these findings, we conclude that recent studies in the IS journal quality stream are credible. As such, these IS journal quality measures provide appropriate indicators of relative journal quality. This conclusion is important for both academic administrators and scientometric researchers, the latter of whom depend on journal quality measures in the evaluation of published IS research

Measuring Researcher-Production in Information Systems

While many studies have assessed IS researcher-production, most have focused on either ranking IS journals or assessing prolific researchers using a restricted time frame and a small inbasketld of journals (i.e., those journals selected for sampling). We found no research that has assessed the IS specificity of journals (i.e., the suitability of journals for publishing IS research) nor any that evaluated IS researcher-production measures. Based on a coding of over 26,000 articles and more than 1,900 authors, this study attempts such an evaluation by (1) determining the rate of publication of IS researchers in 58 journals perceived by at least one IS institution as IS specific, (2) profiling prolific and typical IS researchers using descriptive statistics, (3) evaluating the convergent validity of various researcher-production measures, (4) assessing the reliability of these researcher-production measures by varying baskets of Measuring Researcher-Production in Information Systems by C. Chua, L. Cao, K. Cousins, and D. W. Straub journals and time periods, and (5) comparing the sensitivity of measures across prolific and typical researchers. The study demonstrates that many journals perceived to be of high quality by IS researchers are not specifically targeted to information systems. Changing the evaluation procedure has a significant impact on measures of typical and prolific IS researchers. For typical IS researchers, measures of production are strongly convergent and are not sensitive to changes in journal baskets. However, for prolific researchers, measures of production are not convergent and highly sensitive to changes in journal baskets. The evaluation of both prolific and typical IS researchers is also highly sensitive to temporal effects. The differences in convergent validity and reliability demonstrate that prolific researchers are more sensitive to minor variations in the assessment procedure. Based on the empirical findings, the study closes with recommendations both for the evaluation of researcher-production and for developing institutional target journal lists, i.e., lists of journals viewed favorably by an institution

The Sphere of Influence of Information Systems Journals: A Longitudinal Study

The paper examines the issue of the information systems (IS) discipline’s influence as represented by its key journals. We examine the well-studied topics of cumulative tradition and reference disciplines from two unique perspectives: cohesion and stability. We demarcate journals into “IS journals” and “non-IS journals that are receptive to IS work” and examine the sphere of influence of these journals based on citations over time. Specifically, we compute a log-multiplicative model to identify subareas in the IS discipline and assess journal influence using the index of structural influence based on citations from a basket of 42 IS and IS-related journals over four periods: 1999-2000, 2004-2005, 2009-2010, and 2013-2014. Results indicate that the IS discipline has established a stable and cohesive knowledge underpinning, which converges with emerging (newer) journals and diverges with non-IS journals during the late period. These results suggest that the discipline has developed boundary conditions and a strong cumulative tradition. Furthermore, based on our analysis, pure IS journals gradually gained dominance in their own network and even started to exert influence in the broader network of journals. These findings provide a unique complement to other recent studies that signify the IS discipline’s influence

Assessing Leading Institutions, Faculty, and Articles in Premier Information Systems Research Journals

This study provides a current assessment of the impact of various Information Systems (IS) articles, and the productivity of IS researchers and institutions. Using a data set of Information Systems articles that spans 15 years, we conducted a scientometric study of the field. The articles are drawn from three premier IS journals. We use citation analysis to demonstrate the impact of articles on institutions and individuals in the IS field. In addition, we identify IS topics with the highest impact. The results indicate that leading productive institutions have changed over time, and problematically, institutions outside of North America are poorly represented. We compare our results with earlier productivity findings created using alternative metrics