Information Systems Research: Making an Impact in a Publish-or-Perish World

This paper reports on the panel discussion that took place at the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) in Guimarães, Portugal, on 9 June, 2017. The discussion focused on three central questions: 1) “What does research impact mean for you?”, 2) “What is your approach to making an impact with your research?”, and 3) “What advice would you give to PhD students and early-career scholars?”. While the five panelists (Samir Chatterjee, Alan R. Dennis, Shirley Gregor, Magnus Mähring, and Peter Mertens) partly differed in their views on what impactful research is and how to conduct it, they seemed to largely agree that assessing impact requires a multidimensional view, that impactful IS research requires a clear link to real-world problems (“grand challenges”), and that young scholars need to avoid the trap of confusing research gaps with research relevance. With the panel discussion and this report, we hope to initiate a discussion on the essential topic of research impact in the IS discipline and to contribute to the development of a more uniform, yet more diverse, understanding and appreciation of different approaches to making an impact with IS research

Social Relationships and Mortality Risk: A Meta-analytic Review

In a meta-analysis, Julianne Holt-Lunstad and colleagues find that individuals' social relationships have as much influence on mortality risk as other well-established risk factors for mortality, such as smoking

Health seeking behaviour and the control of sexually transmitted disease.

What people do when they have symptoms or suspicion of a sexually transmitted disease (STD) has major implications for transmission and, consequently, for disease control. Delays in seeking and obtaining diagnosis and treatment can allow for continued transmission and the greater probability of adverse sequelae. An understanding of health seeking behaviour is therefore important if STD control programmes are to be effective. However, taboos and stigma related to sex and STD in most cultures mean that gaining a true picture is difficult and requires considerable cultural sensitivity. At the moment relatively little is known about who people turn to for advice, or about how symptoms are perceived, recognized or related to decisions to seek help. It is argued that such knowledge would assist programme planners in the development of more accessible and effective services, that studies of health seeking behaviour need to include a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, and that studies should include data collection about people who do not present to health care facilities as well as those who do. A pilot protocol for studying STD-related health seeking behaviour in developing countries is briefly presented