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

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

The Making of a 'Top' Open Data City: A Case Study of Edmonton’s Open Data Initiative

In recent years, various models and indexes have been proposed to evaluate and rate the performance of open data initiatives. However, little research examines cities’ open data initiatives in relation to these indexes and how cities achieve open data success. Through an exploratory case study of Edmonton, Canada’s top ranked open data city, this research sheds light on the mechanisms contributing to top-rated and successful open data initiatives. Our findings reveal current open data indexes emphasize publication of data sets over the measurement of impact. The case study suggests that to be successful, cities should approach open data as a continuing journey and must actively engage other stakeholders, particularly intermediaries and citizens. Finally, we observe that common myths constructed around open data help promote open data at a strategic level, but must be viewed skeptically at the operational level

Assessing Scholarly Influence: Using the Hirsch Indices to Reframe the Discourse

This study is part of a program aimed at creating measures enabling a fairer and more complete assessment of a scholar’s contribution to a field, thus bringing greater rationality and transparency to the promotion and tenure process. It finds current approaches toward the evaluation of research productivity to be simplistic, atheoretic, and biased toward reinforcing existing reputation and power structures. This study examines the use of the Hirsch family of indices, a robust and theoretically informed metric, as an addition to prior approaches to assessing the scholarly influence of IS researchers. It finds that while the top tier journals are important indications of a scholar’s impact, they are neither the only nor, indeed, the most important sources of scholarly influence. Other ranking studies, by narrowly bounding the venues included in those studies, distort the discourse and effectively privilege certain venues by declaring them to be more highly influential than warranted. The study identifies three different categories of scholars: those who publish primarily in North American journals, those who publish primarily in European journals, and a transnational set of authors who publish in both geographies. Excluding the transnational scholars, for the scholars who published in these journal sets during the period of this analysis, we find that North American scholars tend to be more influential than European scholars, on average. We attribute this difference to a difference in the publication culture of the different geographies. This study also suggests that the influence of authors who publish in the European journal set is concentrated at a moderate level of influence, while the influence of those who publish in the North American journal set is dispersed between those with high influence and those with relatively low influence. Therefore, to be a part of the top European scholar list requires a higher level of influence than to be a part of the top North American scholar list

The Making of a \u27Top\u27 Open Data City: A Case Study of Edmonton’s Open Data Initiative

In recent years, various models and indexes have been proposed to evaluate and rate the performance of open data initiatives. However, little research examines cities’ open data initiatives in relation to these indexes and how cities achieve open data success. Through an exploratory case study of Edmonton, Canada’s top ranked open data city, this research sheds light on the mechanisms contributing to top-rated and successful open data initiatives. Our findings reveal current open data indexes emphasize publication of data sets over the measurement of impact. The case study suggests that to be successful, cities should approach open data as a continuing journey and must actively engage other stakeholders, particularly intermediaries and citizens. Finally, we observe that common myths constructed around open data help promote open data at a strategic level, but must be viewed skeptically at the operational level

Investigating the Impact of Offline Events on Group Development in an Online Sports Community

The literature on online communities suggests those communities that grow successfully have members who create and share common bonds and common identities. Our goal in this research-in-progress paper is to better understand the impact that shared experiences have on user activities in online communities. We use PLS in a preliminary analysis of the relationships between page views at the online community BigUfans.com and real-life events that affect the online community’s members. The preliminary results suggest that our model accounts for 60.4% of the variance in page views on the site and 27.2% of the contributions (e.g. message board posts) to the site

Online Community User Influence: A Study Using User Status

This research in progress will try to understand the relationship between user influence and status of users in an online community. For online communities a major issue is how to continue to grow and sustain the viability of the community. Oftentimes online communities will gain popularity and then lose that popularity due to stagnation in the number of new users and loss of interest by current users. This research tries to understand how the status of the user plays in the influence of the high level users and the vibrancy of the online community. We measure the influence of the user by using a pseudo Hirsch index to measure the interest of the users posts and use the status of the user in the online community to gauge the user status in the online community

The Discourse of Large Scale Organizational Policy: A Content Analysis of Annual Reports

This study examines the signaling of anticipated organizational futures in shareholder annual reports of large scale technology organizations is the signaling of anticipated organizational futures. In revealing policy and technology change, these reports are predicting likely outcomes in their own corporate trajectory. With influential and large technology firms those predictions also impact the movement of industry change. This study subjects twenty years of the IBM Corporation’s annual reports, specifically the Letter to the stockholders from the CEO, to an intensive content analysis. We identify trends in these data and posit causal relationships between actual events and the foretelling of these events in the letter from the CEO

Integrating Across Sustainability, Political, and Administrative Spheres: A Longitudinal Study of Actors’ Engagement in Open Data Ecosystems in Three Canadian Cities

Over the last decade, cities around the world have embraced the open data movement by launching open data portals. To successfully derive benefits from these initiatives, various individual and organizational actors need to engage with them. These actors undertake activities supporting data publication and dissemination in open data ecosystems. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the IS community’s contribution to the open data movement by conducting a longitudinal, qualitative archival analysis of open data initiatives in three Canadian cities: Edmonton, Toronto, and Montreal. Combining two complementary models of open data and information ecosystems, we explore how actors engage in and across the sustainability, political, and administrative spheres to influence open data initiatives. Our findings suggest most actors operate in a single sphere but that some can operate across two or all three spheres to become ecosystem anchors. Through these sphere-spanning efforts, ecosystem anchors help to shape the way in which open data initiatives evolve. We provide a theoretically grounded explanation of processes in successful open data initiatives and suggest new directions for practice

What Drives User Contribution in an Online Community? A Study in Contributor Influence and User Status

Online communities (OC’s) depend on shared interests and user interactions mediated by technology. Successful OC’s find ways to encourage these interactions to grow communities. Many OC’s have influential users that help grow the community by their very presence and contributions. However, the process for identifying users having the greatest impact is not trivial. This study offers a new method for identifying these influential users through the creation of modified Hirsch indices, which improves upon the current method of using contribution counts or a survey method of polling other users. We validate the new measures against user status and then analyze the measures by correlating them against postings, thread starts, and views and replies to the thread starts for a shared interest OC