An ontology to model the research process in information systems

The IS community has relied mostly on two main paradigms to undertake IS research: positivist and interpretivist. This paper argues that the ongoing debate around which of these paradigms is better suited to undertake IS research has created confusion amongst IS researchers, particularly between those who are relatively inexperienced (e.g. PhD researchers). Inexperienced researchers tend to place emphasis on the justification of their research approaches in the context of existing paradigms without offering a clear description of how the chosen methods and paradigms are applied in the context of their own research, a key issue to assess and understand any research output. This paper does not attempt to give any suggestions as to which research methods/paradigms should be used for IS research, but to raise the awareness that the way we currently communicate our thoughts in the research methods domain may not be very effective. We argue that an initial step to undertake this challenge could be to take a more “practical” approach by focusing on the process of thinking and planning the research activity rather than focusing on the justification of the use of one or many research methods usually “loaned” from other discipline

Brain-Switches for Asynchronous Brain−Computer Interfaces: A Systematic Review

A brain–computer interface (BCI) has been extensively studied to develop a novel communication system for disabled people using their brain activities. An asynchronous BCI system is more realistic and practical than a synchronous BCI system, in that, BCI commands can be generated whenever the user wants. However, the relatively low performance of an asynchronous BCI system is problematic because redundant BCI commands are required to correct false-positive operations. To significantly reduce the number of false-positive operations of an asynchronous BCI system, a two-step approach has been proposed using a brain-switch that first determines whether the user wants to use an asynchronous BCI system before the operation of the asynchronous BCI system. This study presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art brain-switch techniques and future research directions. To this end, we reviewed brain-switch research articles published from 2000 to 2019 in terms of their (a) neuroimaging modality, (b) paradigm, (c) operation algorithm, and (d) performance

Contextuality and Information Systems: how the interplay between paradigms can help

Through this paper, we theorize on the meanings and roles of context in the study of information systems. The literatures of information systems and information science both explicitly conceptualize information systems (and there are multiple overlapping definitions). These literatures also grapple with the situated and generalizable natures of an information system. Given these shared interests and common concerns, this paper is used as a vehicle to explore the roles of context and suggests how multi-paradigmatic research ??? another shared feature of both information science and information systems scholarship ??? provides a means to carry forward more fruitful studies of information systems. We discuss the processes of reconstructed logic and logic-in-use in terms of studying information systems. We argue that what goes on in the practice of researchers, or the logic-in-practice, is typified by what we are calling the contextuality problem. In response, we envision a reconstructed logic, which is an idealization of academic practices regarding context. The logic-in-use of the field is then further explained based on two different views on context. The paper concludes by proposing a model for improving the logic-in-use for the study of information systems