The use of social network analysis to explore relationships between the medical informatics and information systems literature

Health informatics (HI) research has evolved over several decades from its roots in computer science (CS) and artificial intelligence in medicine (AIM). Information Systems (IS) evolved independently, but recently IS within health environments are being embraced as a new test bed for Information Systems theories. The purpose of this paper is to present an objective view of the level of cross reference between the IS and MI bodies of literature, and to either provide evidence of uptake of IS theories in HI or of outlets that would provide appropriate targets for such work due to their antecedents and influence. The extent of the cross fertilization between the two disciplines is still thought to be low. Using social network analysis (SNA) we present an exploratory study which identifies the bridges and cutpoints within a basket of 44 key journals and identify the impact of Information Systems research on the Health Informatics discipline. This work is informed by a number of recent studies using this approach

A Social Network Analysis of the IS Field: Aco-Authorship Network Study

The IS field is a fragmented field with many different research strategies and topics. To complicate this matter, there are many different publication venues and geographic locations. This study will try to look at the co-authorship social network (SN), using three different venues. One of the venues is the top journal in our field, the other a regional conference, and the third is a top French IS journal. The study will take a social network analysis (SNA) approach to see if there are differences in these venues and to take a preliminary look at the IS field. The results indicate that even though we research under the umbrella of IS, differing venues seem to have differing cliques of researchers. The divide between North American and France is also seen in how different the publication strategies seem to be between the two geographic areas

An event-driven approach to dynamic situation detection

To cope with the emerging demand for individual products and services, new approaches for handling the individualization in dynamic supply chains are needed. Our object of investigation is to establish Situation-awareness (SA) in an assistant information system for supply chain partners to cope with individualization-driven demands. Our contribution is an event-driven architecture design to enable situational planning using the Situation Calculus upon distributed contextual information. Sensors raise events among supply chain partner’s information systems, which are combined to context events in order to derive situations on partner level. Our works follows the Design Science in Information Systems Research to design and evaluate the architecture design. The preliminary descriptive evaluation uses life stock transports as an example

A citation analysis of the ACSC 2006 - 2008 proceedings, with reference to the CORE conference and journal rankings

This paper compares the CORE rankings of computing conferences and journals to the frequency of citation of those journals and conferences in the Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC) 2006, 2007 and 2008 proceedings. The assumption underlying this study is that there should be a positive relationship between citation rates and the CORE rankings. Our analysis shows that the CORE rankings broadly reflect the ACSC citations, but with some anomalies. While these anomalies might be minor in the larger scheme of things, anomalies need to be addressed, as the careers of individual academics may depend upon it. Rankings are probably here to stay, and this paper ends with some suggestions on how the rankings process should now evolve, so that it becomes more transparent. Copyright © 2009, Australian Computer Society, Inc

Under What Conditions is IS Research Relevant to Practice? An Analysis of IS Scholars Who Are Mentioned or Cited Often in Trade Magazines and the General Media

The issue of rigor and relevance has been a longstanding topic of discussion and debate within many subfields of business. Among disciplines that are far more established than information systems (IS), including marketing, management, and accounting, scholars continue to debate whether the research produced has any direct value to managers and employees in organizations. Not surprisingly, in disciplines that are much younger – such as information systems – the same issues have arisen. We bring scientometric, empirical methods to bear on the question. Defining relevance as the mention of IS research and IS researchers in mainstream business magazines and general newspapers, we employ a host of methods to identify the extent to which IS research and researchers are mentioned in the mainstream media – or not – and we identify individuals who are most frequently mentioned or cited. Although we find that scholarly IS research is largely ignored in these outlets, we do identify a dozen IS scholars who have maintained a very strong public presence in trade magazines and newspapers

Information Systems: A House Divided?

Is the IS discipline a single discipline that focuses on both behavioral (BIS) and technical (TIS) topics, or is it two disciplines split between these orientations? Current opinion emphasizes BIS and reinforces the notion that researchers practice research in disconnected silos as opposed to a relatively continuous web. Such silos do disservice to the diversity of scholarly interests, skew productivity expectations in favor of small subsets of journals that often exclude technical- and decision science-oriented journals, and run the risk of creating self-perpetuating journal groupings. Silos disadvantage IS researchers by making the discipline narrower in comparison to other business disciplines and contradict the nature of IS pedagogy that equally reflects technology and management. We applied social network and cross-citation analyses to a sample of 98 IS journals to examine the cohesiveness of IS and to understand the extent to which boundary-spanning journals maintain scholarly connections between the approaches. Distinguishing between weak and strong ties among journals, we found that a discipline that comprises both BIS and TIS journals is highly cohesive in terms of weaker ties and that many boundary-spanning journals are quite balanced in their citations to and from each orientation. However, we did not find that IS is uniformly cohesive. Even so, our findings imply that IS scholars with different interests can parse out distinct subsets of journals that are central to their interests. We demonstrate as much by examining the most central journals for three examples of IS scholars: those with a strongly behavioral approach, with sociotechnical interests, and with specialized interests, such as medical informatics. The most central journals for these three interests are distinct subsets of the IS discipline

Examining Scholarly Influence: A Study in Hirsch Metrics and Social Network Analysis

This dissertation research is focused on how we, as researchers, ‘influence’ others researchers. In particular, I am concerned with the notion of what constitutes the ‘influence’ of a scholar and how ‘influence’ is conferred upon scholars. This research is concerned with the construct called ‘scholarly influence’. Scholarly influence is of interest because a clear “theory of scholarly influence” does not yet exist. Rather a number of surrogate measures or concepts that are variable are used to evaluate the value of one’s academic work. ‘Scholarly influence’ is broken down into ‘ideational influence’ or the influence that one has through publication and the uptake of the ideas presented in the publication, and ‘social influence’ or the influence that one has through working with other researchers. Finally through the use of the definition of ‘scholarly influence’ this dissertation tries to commence a definition of ‘quality’ in scholarly work

Potencial Utilização de um Enterprise Resource Planning System para Suportar Práticas de Gestão de Conhecimento nas Organizações. Uma Aplicação com Dynamics Nav da Microsoft

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estatística e Gestão de InformaçãoNas últimas décadas, o mundo que conhecíamos alterou-se; o tempo "acelerou", o mundo "encolheu", assistiu-se à dispersão dos centros de decisão, à interdependência das economias mundiais e à mobilidade das pessoas e bens. Estas alterações estão relacionadas com a evolução tecnológica e com as mudanças que as estruturas empresariais têm sofrido, acompanhadas por processos de renovação tecnológica e métodos de gestão e produção, que foram para além da automatização de tarefas, informatização e implementação de novos sistemas de gestão. Neste contexto, a informação é um recurso vital no suporte à decisão e à acção organizacional, tanto a nível estratégico, como táctico e operacional. Sendo a sua gestão e exploração, devido ao aumento exponencial do fluxo de informação e ao volume de transacções armazenadas, que se prevê que aumentem, um factor crítico de sucesso no desempenho da organização no contexto empresarial, tecnológico e concorrencial. Com um cenário de competição cada vez mais agressivo e um desafio imposto pela concorrência, que têm como factor comum a utilização das mesmas tecnologias de informação, as organizações procuraram diferenciar-se da concorrência pela definição de estratégias que incluíssem a implementação de sistemas de integração e de gestão da informação, para que a informação pudesse ser transformada em conhecimento gerador de valor acrescentado. O objectivo desta dissertação é explorar a potencial utilização de um Enterprise Resource Planning System para suportar práticas de gestão de conhecimento nas organizações. É utilizada uma abordagem inspirada na análise de redes sociais para compreender se a informação armazenada nestes sistemas é transformada pelos utilizadores em conhecimento verdadeiramente gerador de vantagens competitivas sustentáveis. A presente dissertação estuda os efeitos acima enunciados no Dynamic NAV da Microsoft através de um estudo de caso

The Role of Information Among Policy Elites: A Case Study of the Federal Communications Commission

For the most part, Federal Communication Commission policy has gone unnoticed by the American public for most of its seventy-five year history. That all changed in the spring of 2003. In the fall of 2001, the FCC launched its Third Biennial Review of media ownership rules. By the spring of 2003, the FCC was inundated with electronically filed comments, most of which expressed displeasure at the proposed rule which relaxed ownership rules for both television and radio. The resulting vote of 3-2 in favor of the rule change outraged many Americans. This research is a case study focused on determining the role that information played in decision making among the policy elites of the FCC. Given the limitations of a positivist approach to policy study, this study employs the methodology of Network Text Analysis (NTA) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover knowledge maps. This discovery is intended to reveal what criteria guided the decisions that emerge in the written policy, the five commissioner comments, the Third District Court opinion, the 12 FCC commissioned studies, and the public record. This analysis, which uses SNA, reveals consistent concepts or knowledge maps; primarily reasoned analysis, competition, legal, and broadcast media. Additionally, this research shows that the policy itself was most responsive to ecomments filed by corporations and interest groups - not individual citizens. The research shows that the media had little influence in this policy primarily because they reported on the policy during the week that the policy was released