Rejoinder to “Reconsidering Counting Articles in Ranked Venues (CARV) as the Appropriate Evaluation Criteria for the Advancement of Democratic Discourse in the IS Field”

Abstract

In their article, Cuellar, Truex, and Takeda (2019) criticize the "process for evaluating scholarly output, "counting articles in ranked venues' (CARV)" (p. 188). In their view, CARV limits the open exchange of ideas and, thereby, democratic discourse, which leads to unwanted performative effects and, ultimately, inhibits the growth of the information systems (IS) field. They propose the scholarly capital model (SCM) as a preferable mechanism that evaluators should employ to assess scholarly capital instead of scholarly output. In this rejoinder, we argue that CARV does not claim to measure output quality; it neither limits quality in the IS field nor the IS field's growth, and mingling the effects of CARV with debates on quality or growth could be misleading. Replacing CARV would not change the game, only its rules. We posit that we all entered academia voluntarily knowing its rules and argue that colleagues facing P&T committees should recognize and focus on the specific (CARV-based or not) criteria of their institutions' committees. While we expect that a new method will replace CARV in the not so distant future, we are convinced that, until then, a CARV-based environment offers ample opportunity to advance quality and growth of the IS field.

Invited Viewpoint: How well does the Information Systems discipline fare in the Financial Times’ top 50 Journal list?

“…In some senses journal lists represent a game that has to be played and, as with all games, understanding the rules is essential. As Loebbecke et al (2019) argue, 'we voluntarily and happily joined the academic game knowing it had certain rules, so we feel that we ought to play by the rules whether we like them or not. '…”