A Systematic Review of Social Networks Research in Information Systems: Building a Foundation for Exciting Future Research

Social networking applications such as blogs, instant messengers, podcasts, social networking websites (e.g., Renren in China, Vkontakte in Russia, Facebook), professional networking websites (e.g., LinkedIn), Twitter, and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) have become increasingly popular in the last few years. Because these applications have substantial implications for users, organizations, and society, social networks (SNs) have gained attention from information systems (IS) researchers and grown steadily as a research area since 2004. However, to organize the accumulated research and encourage researchers to examine new and pressing issues in SNs, available knowledge needs to be synthesized and research gaps need to be addressed (Bandara et al., 2011). Therefore, we systematically reviewed publications about SNs published in major IS journals between January 2004 and August 2013 and, in this paper, overview the state of IS research regarding SNs. We show the evolution of the existing IS research on SNs to build a common nomenclature and taxonomy for this area of research, to identify theories used, and to provide a useful roadmap for future research in this area

Activity-Centric Computing Systems

• Activity-Centric Computing (ACC) addresses deep-rooted information management problems in traditional application centric computing by providing a unifying computational model for human goal-oriented ‘activity,’ cutting across system boundaries. • We provide a historical review of the motivation for and development of ACC systems, and highlight the need for broadening up this research topic to also include low-level system research and development. • ACC concepts and technology relate to many facets of computing; they are relevant for researchers working on new computing models and operating systems, as well as for application designers seeking to incorporate these technologies in domain-specific applications

A Review of Green IS Research and Directions for Future Studies

As practitioners become more interested in green information systems, the IS academic community requires direction in how to examine this important phenomenon. We conduct a systematic and comprehensive review of the academic literature surrounding green IS and compares the results with those from the practical literature. Through this review, we identify the main categories in the literature and assess the current state of research into green IS. We discuss some limitations of the current literature, posit research directions for future scholars, and address the gaps in the current research on green IS

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

On the Place of Text Data in Lifelogs, and Text Analysis via Semantic Facets

Current research in lifelog data has not paid enough attention to analysis of cognitive activities in comparison to physical activities. We argue that as we look into the future, wearable devices are going to be cheaper and more prevalent and textual data will play a more significant role. Data captured by lifelogging devices will increasingly include speech and text, potentially useful in analysis of intellectual activities. Analyzing what a person hears, reads, and sees, we should be able to measure the extent of cognitive activity devoted to a certain topic or subject by a learner. Test-based lifelog records can benefit from semantic analysis tools developed for natural language processing. We show how semantic analysis of such text data can be achieved through the use of taxonomic subject facets and how these facets might be useful in quantifying cognitive activity devoted to various topics in a person's day. We are currently developing a method to automatically create taxonomic topic vocabularies that can be applied to this detection of intellectual activity

Does “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” Support the Basket with Bibliometric Measures?

We re-examine “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” by Lowry et al. (2013). They sought to use bibliometric methods to validate the Basket as the eight top quality journals that are “strictly speaking, IS journals” (Lowry et al., 2013, pp. 995, 997). They examined 21 journals out of 140 journals considered as possible IS journals. We also expand the sample to 73 of the 140 journals. Our sample includes a wider range of approaches to IS, although all were suggested by IS scholars in a survey by Lowry and colleagues. We also use the same sample of 21 journals in Lowry et al. with the same methods of analysis so far as possible. With the narrow sample, we replicate Lowry et al. as closely as we can, whereas with the broader sample we employ a conceptual replication. This latter replication also employs alternative methods. For example, we consider citations (a quality measure) and centrality (a relevance measure in this context) as distinct, rather than merging them as in Lowry et al. High centrality scores from the sample of 73 journals do not necessarily indicate close connections with IS. Therefore, we determine which journals are of high quality and closely connected with the Basket and with their sample. These results support the broad purpose of Lowry et al., finding a wider set of high quality and relevant journals than just MISQ and ISR, and find a wider set of relevant, top quality journals