Phylogeny and Power in the IS Domain: A Response to Benbasat and Zmud\u27s Call for Returning to the IT Artifact

We question a call by Benbasat and Zmud (2003) to narrow the focus of information systems research to a set of core properties. We first discuss three limitations of their argument and then offer two alternative viewpoints for analyzing the state of our profession. One viewpoint casts the arguments of Benbasat and Zmud in terms of power in the domain of scholarship. The second viewpoint, based on colonial systems, sees fresh perspectives, discipline newcomers, boundary spanners, and topical outliers as the likely source of the field¡¯s creativity, vitality, and long-term survival. We conclude that the discipline is best served by focusing on supporting diverse and novel research. We proffer neither an alternative research agenda nor a research-appropriate evaluation mechanism since we demonstrate that such restrictive policies hinder both our relevance and potential survival. We suggest some administrative changes for the IS discipline intended to encourage and nurture creativity without sacrificing academic rigor

Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

The Contribution of Top IS Publications to Subsequent Research: A Citation Analysis

Information Systems (IS) research is undertaken to advance the body of knowledge on IS-related phenomena at the individual, group, and organizational levels of analysis. The goals of conducting IS research range from individual learning—e.g., the intellectual development of individual scholars over community learning; e.g., the enhancement of research in the broader IS academic community to the improvement of practice in organizations. Whereas IS research has been criticized for having limited practical relevance, many scholars have assumed that IS research is succeeding in having a major impact on the IS academic community itself. This article challenges the assumption. Using citations as a proxy for contributions to subsequent research—or research importance—this study presents average citation figures for 1,992 papers published in six peer-reviewed IS journals between 1996 and 2010. It finds that citation figures are strongly skewed, with a vast majority of works published in top IS outlets being cited rather rarely. The article offers a discussion of the factors that may account for this finding and closes with a brief summary and outlook

A Study of MIS Scholar Community Development via a Collaboration Network Structures Analysis

The objective of this study is to apply collaborative networks to understanding the development process of the Management Information System (MIS) journals’ knowledge community. This research explores four phenomena: whether a co-author network depends on star collaborators, whether this network is a small world, the structural cohesion within the co-author network, and central scholars. We found that the MIS community has a small-world structure and high structural cohesion, so the MIS network is a dense cluster. Another finding was that a small number of researchers receive disproportionate recognition in MIS communities, indicating the presence of preferential attachment. This means that the MIS network contains clear star authors. Furthermore, we infer how a structural network affects knowledge diffusion and information diffusion. In addition, this study discusses changes in each journal’s central scholars to observe patterns of publication for each journal published by a private for-profit organization or sponsored by academic societies

Governance Mechanisms in Digital Platform Ecosystems: Addressing the Generativity-Control Tension

Digital platform owners repeatedly face paradoxical design decisions with regard to their platforms’ generativity and control, requiring them to facilitate co-innovation whilst simultaneously retaining control over third-party complementors. To address this challenge, platform owners deploy a variety of governance mechanisms. However, researchers and practitioners currently lack a coherent understanding of what major governance mechanisms platform owners rely on to simultaneously foster generativity and control. Conducting a structured literature review, we connect the fragmented academic discourse on governance mechanisms with each aspect of the generativity-control tension. Next to providing avenues for prospective digital platform research, we elaborate on the double-sidedness of governance mechanisms in fostering both generativity and control

Co-authorship, Homophily, and Scholarly Influence in Information Systems Research

Information Systems (IS) researchers have increasingly focused attention on understanding the identity of our field (Hirschheim & Klein 2003; Lyytinen & King 2004). One facet of any discipline’s identity is the social aspect of how its scholars actually conduct their work (DeSanctis 2003), which is formally labeled as the study of sociology of science. Contributing to this tradition of work, we empirically examine scholarly influence (Acedo et al., 2006); scientific collaboration, including metrics that capture the prevalence of c-oauthored work; antecedents to co-authorship; and the effect of co-authorship on subsequent citations. Based on analyzing five leading IS journals for a period of seven years, we found that co-authored papers have become increasingly common in leading IS journals and that co-authoring continues to be more prevalent in journals published in North America compared to European journals. Moreover, we found significant effects of homophily related to gender, homophily/proximity, and geography. IS scholars worldwide exhibit a stronger preference for collaborating with co-authors of the same sex and those who attended the same PhD program than one would expect by chance. We also examined differences among journals and found some intriguing results for the effect of co-authorship on citations. Overall, we found evidence that the number of co-authors was positively related to citations although there was some variance across journals. These findings point to a need for more research to better understand both the processes of collaboration and the drivers and downstream benefits associated with it

A Citation Analysis of the Evolution and State of Information Systems within a Constellation of Reference Disciplines

For the past two decades notions of cumulative tradition and reference disciplines have been a significant part of the introspective debates on the IS field. We provide an exploratory test on these notions using sociometric analysis. In doing so, we extend the work of Culnan and Swanson originally carried out about 25 years ago. By using the concept of a work point and reference points to identify where an IS article is published and the extent to which it draws from or contributes to other disciplines, we can position research in the IS field. First, a quantitative analysis of over 72,600 citations spread across 1406 IS articles in 16 journals over the period 1990-2003 reveals a distinct trend toward a cumulative tradition, a changing mix of reference disciplines, and a two-way relationship between IS and some of the more mature disciplines. Second, post-hoc content analysis provides a glimpse of how IS work is being utilized by other disciplines. Overall, our analysis indicates that IS is taking up a more socio-technical persona, building upon its own knowledge base, and repaying its debts by contributing to other disciplines. We interpret the movement towards building a cumulative tradition, and informing work in other disciplines as positive, as we strive toward being part of an intellectual network and establish centrality in areas that matter to us most

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

The Effect of an IS Article’s Structure on Its Impact

Information Systems research often uses article citation counts to judge the impact of articles, journals, and authors, and even to assess the maturity of the discipline. Yet little is known about the drivers of article impact. Motivated by the continued debate on the importance of theory development, methodological rigor, and tradeoffs between rigor and relevance, the authors of this paper examine the structure of theory-based empirical IS articles as a potential determinant of their scientific impact. Using the straightforward measure of page counts, the authors assess the structure of these articles at the macro level and develop hypotheses on article impact. Results indicated that, as hypothesized, the structure of IS articles does determine their impact. Conceptualization and theory development in articles tends to payoff in citation counts, while emphasis on methodology and implications does not. They discuss recommendations for review systems and for authors, as well as for the field as a whole. Supplemental analyses show that highly-influential IS research tends to be theory-based empirical and that, consistent with the evolution of the field, concept to method ratio has been going up in IS articles over time; a synchronization that has paid off in terms of impact