Unpacking the Journal Impact Factor and its Effect on IS Research: Does It Do More Harm than Good?

The “impact factor” computed and published by ISI has become increasingly prominent as a quality measure for evaluating journals and, in turn, the prominence of researchers who publish in them. This paper identifies the origins of the impact factor, as well as its current uses, and numerous problems associated with it. Among these problems are the fact that the conventional impact metric simply examines the number of times an average paper is cited within the first two years after the year of publication – a window that is shorter than the sum of the review cycle time and the publication lead time. As a result, it is simply a matter of chance whether some papers cite a given, published paper within a two-year window. One by-product is that impact factors exhibit highly irregular (i.e., jagged) patterns over time, rather than smooth growth curves. The impact factor is susceptible to “gaming” by journal editors; moreover, it is susceptible to the positive effect of a “blockbuster” paper – which causes a journal’s impact factor to surge upward for a short time and then fall dramatically. We predict various statistical anomalies in journal impact factor data, and we test these predictions with published data

Examining User Technology Interaction: Toward a Sociotechnical Theory for Understanding User Adjustment to Mobile Technologies

Researchers from organization, management, and information systems areas have studied the impact of information technology (IT) on users in organizations for several decades. As a form of emerging technology, mobile computing has raised new research directions, as well as challenges for both computer scientists and social scientists. In this paper, we explore the issues of how well the emerging mobile computing technologies conform to past models and predictions that have been offered for explaining the impacts of IT. In particular, this paper identifies the general lack of attention to individual-level differences that may interact with contextual factors to shape organizational users’ reactions to this new computing paradigm. We thus propose that IS researchers consider a specific sociotechnical theory – Theory of Work Adjustment (TWA) – to investigate how individual users adjust to technology-initiated changes in work practices resulting from mobile technologies. By highlighting the insights offered by TWA, we believe that this model is useful for analyzing individual responses to the adoption of mobile computing technologies

Knowledge and Skills Associated with Information Technology: Levels and Influences

In recent years, research on IT usage has increasingly focused on post-adoption usage, rather than initial acceptance of a technology regarded as new. Consistent with this recent trend, we seek to understand what factors influence employees’ ongoing IT use and processes they rely on for expanding their knowledge and skills within organizational workgroups. Based on recommendations by Jasperson, Carter and Zmud (2005), we seek to understand feature-level IT use of office software applications that are most frequently used within four workgroups. We first document the knowledge and skills of each employee at the feature level. Second, we analyze detailed, feature level knowledge with a novel method based on Venn diagrams that reflects the degree to which coworkers have fully-, partially-, or non-overlapping knowledge and skills. Finally, we employ open-coding methods to identify enabling and inhibiting factors that shape the amount and effectiveness of IT-related knowledge transfer among coworkers. Our study yields surprising findings – including the fact that some employees have unique IT skills that do not overlap with their coworkers. Moreover, employees seek help from other workers who are at similar levels in the organizational hierarchy, and usually avoid seeking help from colleagues whose knowledge level is considerably higher, or whose knowledge base is radically different. Our results show that employees prefer to seek help from coworkers whose knowledge is similar to their own. We conclude by discussing the implication of our findings for managers and researchers

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

A Longitudinal Scientometric Analysis of Research Published in IFIP 9.4 (2002-2013)

The use of scientometric techniques for analyzing trends and patterns in IS research is becoming increasingly common. We describe how such techniques have been used to answer questions for the IS field as a whole and for specific research communities, journals, and topics. While scient-ometric analyses of ICT for development journals and conferences are starting to emerge, such studies have not employed longitudinal methods to analyze trends over time. We pose several questions that longitudinal scientometric methods can answer and then apply such methods to papers published in the oldest, largest conference in the area of ICT for development: IFIP 9.4. For the years 2002-2013, we identify the most frequent authors contributing to IFIP 9.4, as well as changes over time in terms of most frequent contributors and the institutions and countries represented. We also identify the frequently-cited sources in IFIP 9.4 papers, showing how they have changed over time. Finally, we use co-citation analysis to identify the topics analyzed in IFIP 9.4 papers, based on citations shared among papers. We conclude with directions that future research may address – such as comparing our results with other ICT4D conferences or journals

Crisis in American Information Systems Education: Innovations to Address the Threat of Offshoring

Our classrooms are nearly empty. The job prospects for our graduates are bleak. Offshoring is reconfiguring the American information technology industry. What are we to do? After years of unprecedented growth, demand, and skill shortages, IT faculty find themselves in a new environment. As a shortterm solution, some faculty are scrambling to develop and redesign courses. This is not enough and will not sustain the fundamental shifts needed in a global economy. How can individual faculty, Information Systems departments, and schools respond to survive the rapidly changing landscape? The situation calls for innovations in academic delivery. Academics must serve as examples of agility to students by rethinking and revising curricula. We have responded when faced with other changes such as DBMS, end-user computing, networking, and e-commerce when it was in our favor. Can we do it again? How do we instill in students how they can become innovators and not merely problem solvers? What new organizational forms can academic programs take to help students bridge global teams? The panel will discuss innovations to address the crisis of low enrollments and dated skill sets. The format lists panelists in order of presentation along with their relevant expertise

The Influence of Subgroup Dynamics on Knowledge Coordination in Distributed Teams: A Transactive Memory System and Group Faultline Perspective

With the rapid growth of globalization, distributed teams have become increasingly common in organizations. This research investigates the impact of inter-subgroup dynamics on knowledge coordination in distributed teams. To address this research question, we extend and apply theory from two primary sources – Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) theory and the faultline model. The paper uses data collected from 22 distributed MBA student teams to provide several novel insights into how perceived faultlines impact team processes (knowledge coordination) and outcomes (team performance and member satisfaction). First, perceived faultlines reduce knowledge coordination, which is an important antecedent of team performance and member satisfaction. Second, knowledge coordination fully mediates the negative effect of perceived faultines on team performance and member satisfaction. Third, low levels of TMS not only impair performance, but also reduce member satisfaction in distributed teams. Implications for research and practice are discussed together with potential avenues for future research

Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Identify Themes in IS Healthcare Research

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) is a new text mining approach that is increasingly being adopted by IS scholars. In this paper, we provide an overview of various research contexts in which IS and other business scholars have applied this approach. We first identity the diverse body of scholarly and field-based contexts in which LSA has been applied. Next, we propose an empirical analysis of published research on healthcare information technology (HIT), to identify different themes in the IS literature from 1990 to the present date. Our empirical analysis will identify key research trends in IS journal papers for three time periods, based on an analysis of health-related papers published in 20 leading IS journals. In addition to providing more awareness of this research approach, we seek to identify important trends and changes in healthcare IT research over time