EVOLUTION OF IS RESEARCH BASED ON LITERATURE PUBLISHED IN TWO LEADING IS JOURNALS - EJIS AND MISQ

There is growing interest amongst IS academics and scholars in studying the evolution of IS research. Scholarly literature published in top-ranking IS journals provide a pertinent source for this exploratory study. However, the list of journals selected for such a study should ideally be representative of publication outlets from different regions of the world. Thus, in the research on IS evolution presented in this paper, the authors’ selection of the two leading IS journals – EJIS and MISQ – is motivated by their conscious attempt to chart the evolution of IS research in both European and North American contexts. Towards this end, the paper employs co-citation analysis to identify prominent articles, authors and journals being referenced to by the citing EJIS and MISQ authors; it utilises extended citation data (e.g., keywords and article abstracts) to recognise frequently occurring noun phrases in the citing articles. The contribution of this paper is the methodological study of the evolution of IS research based on a comparative co-citation analysis of journals. The limitation of the paper is its underlying dataset that presently comprises of only two journals

Charting diversity and change in IS publications: a tri-continental journal analysis

The past decade has seen enormous changes in the availability, use, and application of information systems. Information systems are no longer the preserve of business and the corporation but have become a routine part of everyday life. The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent to which the increased diversity in application and use of information systems in the past decade has been reflected in increased diversity of the publications of three key journals of three continents – North America, Europe, and Australasia. The paper contributes to the debate on research diversity in Information Systems in three ways. Firstly, it describes four key underpinning dimensions for understanding Information Systems (IS) research diversity in the information age. Secondly, it details the results of a content analysis which examines the trends in research and methodological diversity within the journals MIS Quarterly (MISQ), European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) and the Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) during the years 2001-2010. Finally, the paper reflects on diversity within these journals and discusses the findings in relation to both exogenous and endogenous pressures on the discipline more broadly

An Historically-Grounded Critical Analysis of Research Articles in MIS

In order to explore scientific writing in Information Systems (IS) journals, we adopt a combination of historical and rhetorical approaches. We first investigate the history of universities, business schools, learned societies and scientific articles. This perspective allows us to capture the legacy of scientific writing standards, which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, we focus on two leading IS journals (EJIS and MISQ). An historical analysis of both outlets is carried out, based on data related to their creation, evolution of editorial statements, and key epistemological and methodological aspects. We also focus on argumentative strategies found in a sample of 436 abstracts from both journals. Three main logical anchorages (sometimes combined) are identified, and related to three argumentative strategies: 'deepening of knowledge', 'solving an enigma' and 'addressing a practical managerial issue'. We relate these writing norms to historical imprints of management and business studies, in particular: enigmafocused rhetorics, interest in institutionalized literature, neglect for managerially grounded rhetoric and lack of reflexivity in scientific writing. We explain this relation as a quest for academic legitimacy. Lastly, some suggestions are offered to address the discrepancies between these writing norms and more recent epistemological and theoretical stances adopted by IS researchers.argumentative strategies; history; academic writing; legitimacy

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

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 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 Methodology for Profiling Literature using Co-citation Analysis

The contribution of this paper is a methodology for profiling literature in Information Systems (IS) using a powerful tool for co-citation analysis - Citespace. Co-citation analysis provide important insights into knowledge domains by identifying frequently co-cited papers, authors and journals. The methodology is applied to a dataset comprising of citation data pertaining to a leading European journal – the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS). In this paper we outline the different steps involved in using Citespace to profile literature in IS and use the EJIS dataset as an example. We hope that the readers will employ and/or extend the given methodology to conduct similar bibliometric studies in IS and other research areas

Dialectical Inquiry in Information Systems Research: A Synthesis of Principles

Although dialectical inquiry has been sporadically and selectively applied in the Information Systems (IS) discipline, and premier IS journals increasingly welcome dialectical inquiries, we lack methodological guidance on its application and evaluation, hindering its adoption as an important and valid IS research method. In response, we present a critical analysis of general dialectics literature and 63 extant IS dialectical inquiry publications in 18 journals spanning three decades, revealing that there is a growing and sizeable community of IS researchers using dialectical inquiry explicitly or implicitly to examine how sociotechnical phenomena change. Based on this analysis, we synthesize six principles for dialectical inquiry that are firmly rooted in dialectical philosophy, evidenced in IS publications, clearly distinct from each other, and together comprehensive. As such, our contribution can help IS researchers, reviewers, and editors to extend and solidify their methodological repertoire