Six Inversion Strategies for Avoiding Rejection in Academic Publishing: Lessons from the IS Discipline

The publication process in many academic disciplines, including in Information Systems (IS), can seem arduous and unpredictable, particularly for early career researchers. While the literature offers plentiful guidance on how to pursue a paper acceptance, this paper offers a crisp summary of common mistakes that lead to rejection and how to avoid them. We provide six actionable inversion strategies for avoiding common mistakes that often lead to paper rejection. Namely, when preparing a paper, we recommend you (1) abstain from methodological promiscuity and (2) never overclaim (but try not to underclaim either); When submitting a paper, it is a good idea to (3) steer clear of bootlicking and (3) avoid sloppiness; And, after receiving the reviews, you should (5) forego belligerence, and (6) stop flogging a dead horse. These inversion strategies can help early career researchers better navigate the review process, increasing the chances of their papers maturing, and helping to avoid mistakes that lower the chance of publishing in high quality IS journals

A Practical Guide for Successful Revisions and Engagements with Reviewers

Revising a manuscript after receiving a revise-and-resubmit decision from a top-tier journal can be just as arduous as developing a new paper from scratch. In this editorial, based on our experiences revising papers over the years, we provide roadmaps and guidelines for completing successful revisions for top journals. In doing so, we offer practical tips for completing three major tasks—making sense of a review packet, revising a manuscript, and crafting responses to reviewer comments. We conclude by recommending that authors be active reviewers themselves because, by doing so, they can develop their own insights on how peer review works and become more skillful at revising their papers and responding to reviewers

A Great Escape: The Effect of Negative Public Affiliation on Belongingness to Virtual Communities

In this study, we study negative public affiliation, which we define as discomfort with being publicly linked to a potentially socially stigmatized group or interest. We investigate how users who feel negative public affiliation form feelings of belonging to a virtual community. We also consider the impact that brand congruity (how much a user identifies with an interest or brand) has on feelings of belonging. To investigate negative public affiliation, we drew a sample from members of Twilight-themed virtual communities and evaluated the interrelationship between negative public affiliation, brand congruity, and belongingness (how well users feel they fit in virtual communities). Our results indicate that high negative public affiliation and high brand congruity with Twilight positively impacted feelings of belonging: users who felt Twilight reflected their identity but felt uncomfortable publicly discussing their interest felt a stronger sense of belonging in relation to their virtual communities. Our study offers practical implications for firms seeking to design and maintain virtual communities that support the broadest possible group of users. Of equal importance, our study provides a new direction for information systems research on virtual communities and suggests a need to study users who participate in socially uncomfortable, stigmatized, or unacceptable communities

Concentration, Competence, Confidence, and Capture: An Experimental Study of Age, Interruption-based Technostress, and Task Performance

The proliferation of information and communication technologies such as instant messenger has created an increasing number of workplace interruptions that cause employee stress and productivity losses across the world. This growth in interruptions has paralleled another trend: the graying of the workforce, signifying that the labor force is aging rapidly. Insights from theories of stress and cognitive aging suggest that older people may be particularly vulnerable to the negative consequences of interruptions. Hence, this study examines whether, how, and why technology-mediated interruptions impact stress and task performance differently for older compared to younger adults. The study develops a mediated moderation model explaining why older people may be more susceptible to the negative impacts of technology-mediated interruptions than younger people, in terms of greater mental workload, more stress, and lower performance. The model hypothesizes that age acts as a moderator of the interruption-stress relationship due to age-related differences in inhibitory effectiveness, computer experience, computer self-efficacy, and attentional capture. We refer to these age-related differences as concentration, competence, confidence, and capture, respectively, or the four Cs. We tested our model through a laboratory experiment with a 2 x 2 x 2 mixed-model design, manipulating the frequency with which interruptions appear on the screen and their salience (e.g., reddish colors). We found that age acts as a moderator of the interruption-stress link due to differences in concentration, competence, and confidence, but not capture. This study contributes to IS research by explicitly elucidating the role of age in IS phenomena, especially interruption-based technostress

Do We Trust the Technology? People? or Both? Ruminations on Technology Trust

While an increasing number of trust studies examine technological artifacts as trust recipients, we still lack a basic understanding of how technology trust “fits” into the broader nomological net espoused by trust theories. This paper adopts a measure of technology trust comprised of IT-specific dimensions. We then articulate a research model that separates technology trust from interpersonal trust (i.e., trust in humans). Our empirical study provides evidence that even in a context where technology fully replaces human interaction, technology trust does not substitute for interpersonal trust. Rather, our findings suggest that technology trust complements interpersonal trust as a predictor of intention and behavior

How Does Anonymizing Crowdsourced Users\u27 Identity Affect Fact-checking on Social Media Platforms? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis

The rapid spread of misinformation on social media platforms has affected many facets of society, including presidential elections, public health, the global economy, and human well-being. Crowdsourced fact-checking is an effective method to mitigate the spread of misinformation on social media. A key factor that affects user behavior on crowdsourcing platforms is users\u27 anonymity or identity disclosure. Within the crowdsourced-based fact-checking context, it is also unknown whether and how identity anonymity affects the users\u27 fact-checking contribution performance. Leveraging a natural experiment policy happening on Twitter, we adopt regression discontinuity design to investigate two research questions: Whether and how the identity anonymity affects the crowdsourced fact-checking quantity and quality; how the characteristics of the crowdsourced users moderate the main impact. We find that the identity anonymization policy may not increase fact-checking users\u27 contribution quantity, but the fact-checking quality does increase. Our research has both theoretical and practical implications

Fostering Purchasing Intention: The Influence of Appearance and Functionality on Consumers’ Initial Trust in a web Vendor

In the highly competitive e-commerce environment, a large portion of the web vendors are new, small, or lack name recognition. When a customer visits an unknown vendor, the website needs to provide signals that it is trustworthy, or the customer may not complete a transaction. This research investigates how vendors may signal trustworthiness through features of the website. We examine how to win consumers’ trust through examining appearance and functionality features of a website. Consumers’ awareness and impressions of these features should influence their initial trust in a web vendor. If the vendor successfully fosters trust, then consumers will be more likely to make a purchase. We conduct an empirical study to test these relationships. This research contributes to the literature of online trust and web design. We will discuss the implications for research and practice in the conference

Job Satisfaction in Agile Development Teams: Agile Development as Work Redesign

Agile software-development advocates claim that an important value proposition of agile methods is that they make people more motivated and satisfied with their jobs. While several studies present anecdotal evidence that agile methods increase motivation and satisfaction, research has not theoretically explained or empirically examined how agile development practices relate to team members’ feelings about their work. Drawing on the management and software-development literature, we articulate a model of job design that connects agile development practices to perceptions of job characteristics and, thereby, improve agile team members’ job satisfaction. Using data collected from 252 software-development professionals, we tested the model and found a positive relationship between agile project-management and software-development practices and employees’ perceptions of job characteristics. Further, we found direct effects between agile development-practice use and job satisfaction. Finally, we found interaction effects between the use of agile project-management and software-development approaches and the perception of job autonomy. With this study, we contribute to the literature by theoretically explaining and directly evaluating agile development practices’ impact on individuals’ perceptions about their job characteristics and on their job satisfaction