Response to “Ideational Influence, Connectedness, and Venue Representation: Making an Assessment of Scholarly Capital”

I respond to Cueller, Takeda, Vidgen & Truex (2016), who proposes three measures of scholarly output: “1) the extent to which other scholars take up the scholar’s work (ideational influence), 2) who the scholar works with (connectedness), and 3) how well the scholar publishes in venues in the scholar’s field (venue representation)” (p. 3). These are not novel and valid measures of research output. Ideational influence is operationalized as counting citations, which improve current practice but is not novel. Connectedness assesses position in a co-authorship network and rewards the cronies of central players without assessing their output. Venue representation involves counting papers in a different basket, which commits an ecological fallacy. Connectedness and venue representation are based on a common misinterpretation of network centrality measures. Adopting either of these measures in practice would distract from actual impact and so be negative for our field

Market-Enabling Internet Agents

The growth of the Internet offers a vision of ubiquitous electronic commerce. A particularly exciting feature of Internet commerce is the ability to automate the search for price or other product information across multiple suppliers by using an “agent” to retrieve the relevant information. The use of such agents has the potential to dramatically reduce buyers’ search costs. We argue that such agents effectively transform a diverse set of offerings into an economically efficient market and that their use should therefore be analyzed in these terms. In this paper, we present a simple model of the competitive effects of agents used to support purchasing. The model suggests that agents can be successful for diversified goods but resisted for commodities and near- commodities. We illustrate our model by analyzing the situation of current electronic commerce ventures on the Internet

Whither Journals?

In this presentation, I talk about the role of journals and how that role is changing with the increased use of web-based database for searching for articles. This presentation was made in Twenty Ninth International Conference on Information Systems, Paris 2008, as part of a panel on Open Access Publishing and the Future of Information Systems Research. The panel description is available in ICIS 2008 Proceedings at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2008/126/ and the other presentations are available through the following: http://sprouts.aisnet.org/8-35

The Virtual Factory: Discontinuous Work in a Virtual Organization

The Virtual Factory is an organized network for regional cooperation in the manufacturing industry in the region around Lake Constance, on the border between Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The network was developed through a collaborative action research project started by the Institute for Technology Management, University of St. Gallen2. Project leadership (the core partners) came from entrepreneurs and senior managers from companies in the region and four researchers from the Institute

Rejoinder to Open Access: The Whipping Boy for Problems in Scholarly Publishing

This is a commentary as part of the debate on Open Access

Use of the Web for Electronic Commerce in Real Estate

In this paper, we will explore the ways in which electronic commerce, the World-wide Web (WWW) in particular, is affecting the real estate industry. Real estate is a promising setting for studying electronic commerce because it is an information-intensive and information-driven industry; transaction-based, with high value and asset-specificity; market-intermediary (agents and brokers connect buyers and sellers rather than buying or selling themselves); and experiencing on-going information technology (IT) related changes. In this paper, we apply a coordination theory framework to suggest where IT might change the process of buying or selling a house. Electronic commerce applications have the potential to drastically change current practices in the real-estate industry, including the disintermediation of agents. Web-based commerce is eroding the long-enjoyed information monopoly of real-estate agents. We illustrate this potential by reviewing a number of existing real estate websites that demonstrate the possible impact of electronic commerce on this industry

The Effects of Linking on Genres of Web Documents

Documents on the Web can be composed of multiple Web pages, suggesting the need to consider how linking between pages affects a document\u27s form. We illustrate this point by considering patterns of linking in a common genre of document, the Frequently Asked Questions file or FAQ. In a sample of 70 FAQs, we found four patterns of linking: no links, links within the page, links to pages on the same host and links to other hosts. We suggest that links that tie together document pieces simply recreate the already accepted FAQ genre, but links that provide navigation within the document or that link to other information sources begin to extend and adapt the FAQ genre to the needs and capabilities of the Web

Exploring Strengths and Limits on Open Source Software Engineering Processes: A Research Agenda

Many researchers have investigated the nature and characteristics of open source software (OSS) projects and their developer communities. In this position paper, after examining some success factors, we discuss potential limits on the replicability and portability of OSS engineering processes. Based on this analysis, we propose a research agenda to better understand the current nature of the processes and thus the strengths and the limitations

Boundary-spanning documents in online communities

Online communities bring together people with varied access to and understanding of the work at hand, who must collaborate through documents of various kinds. We develop a framework articulating the characteristics of documents supporting collaborators with asymmetric access to knowledge versus those with symmetric knowledge. Drawing on theories about document genre, boundary objects and provenance, we hypothesize that documents supporting asymmetric groups are likely to articulate or prescribe their own 1) purpose, 2) context of use, 3) content and form and 4) provenance in greater detail than documents used by people with symmetric access to knowledge. We are testing these hypotheses through content analysis of documents and instructions from a variety of free/libre open source projects. We present preliminary findings consistent with the hypotheses developed. The completed study will suggest new directions for research on communications in online communities, as well as advice for those supporting such communities