The beginnings of a new era: time to reflect on 17 years of the ISJ

Abstract

In this paper we reflect on the first 17 years of the Information Systems Journal (ISJ). The reflections are considered under three headings: origin of papers (authors, geographical period, gender and departments), research paradigms (positive/interpretive, qualitative/quantitative, non-empirical/empirical, espoused theories and research method) and finally, topics. We find that throughout the period, the published papers evidenced a greater internationalization of the journal. On the other hand, some regions and countries are poorly represented. Another imbalance concerns the lack of practitioner papers along with an authorgender imbalance. Qualitative research exceeds quantitative research by a factor of more than 2:1. Interestingly, papers classified as descriptive/conceptual/ theoretical have been largely superseded in the period by those that have some empirical evidence to illustrate the points made. Sometimes it is argued that the discipline of information systems lacks theory and thinking pieces but the ISJ suggests that this is far from the truth. Further, our analysis has revealed around 250 topics discussed using many research methods to explain the phenomena. Depending on the point of view, this may show that the discipline either lacks focus or is exciting and pluralistic. We lean to the latter view, but others have argued for focusing on fewer topics and research methods.This first issue of Volume 18 of the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) marks another milestone -four in fact -of the journal's progress. First, we have moved from four to six issues annually. This reflects that the journal is now attracting a larger number of high quality submissions. It has been doing so for some time but we have waited to make this move until we were convinced that the expanded content was sustainable in terms of quality papers. Second, from this issue, the journal receives the official approval of the Association of Information Systems (AIS) -hence the AIS logo on the front cover. The AIS represents the international information systems academic

A profile of OR research and practice published in the Journal of the Operational Research Society

“…Furthermore, our study is likely to stimulate researchers to profile other OR journals in order to conduct comparative/cross-journal studies which will ultimately help towards the understanding of the overall evolution of the OR discipline. Similar research has also been undertaken in other fields and particularly in Information Systems and Electronic Commerce with great success (Avison et al, 2008;Claver et al, 2000;Dwivedi and Kuljis, 2008;Dwivedi et al, 2008;Dwivedi et al, 2009).…”

In defence of the case study methodology for research into strategy practice

“…Examination of the featured 126 empirical studies from a methodological perspective yields some interesting findings (Table 2). While a number of reviews of IS research at large (Avison et al, 2008;Chen and Hirschheim, 2004;Hirschheim and Klein, 2012;Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991;Palvia et al, 2007;Vessey et al, 2002;Williams et al, 2009) have produced varying results due to the specific literature sets under review, i.e. journal specific (Palvia et al, 2007;Avison et al, 2008) or region specific (Chen and Hirschheim, 2004), the current review of research focussed upon SISP produced encouraging results.…”

Toward an Understanding of the Evolution of IFIP WG 8.6 Research

“…Such an approach for the systematic classification of research published in a particular journal or conference is termed a meta-study or longitudinal literature review (Palvia et al 2007;Dwivedi et al 2009;. Since this approach has been successfully employed previously to profile a number of IS and related journals (Avison et al 2008;Dwivedi, Kiang et al 2008;Dwivedi and Kuljis 2008;Dwivedi et al 2009;Palvia et al 2007), we also utilized it to profile IFIP WG8.6 conference publications.…”

“…Institutional contributions/productivity were examined by utilizing normal count approach in which one count was allocated to each authors even if they were from the same institution. Both the authors' backgrounds and geographic location variables were adapted from previous studies (Avison et al 2008;Dwivedi, Kiang et al 2008;Dwivedi et al 2009). It is important to emphasize at this point that, like previous profiling studies (Palvia et al 2007), the findings of this study, in terms of universities with the most contributors and authors with the most publications, should be regarded as indicative and not an authoritative declaration.…”

“…Bearing in mind the potential usefulness of such an analysis for both audience and editorial/organizing teams, similar efforts have been made to analyze well established conferences such as the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) (Whitley and Galliers 2007), and numerous IS journals including the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) (Dwivedi and Kuljis 2008), Information & Management (I&M) (Palvia et al 2007), Information Systems Frontiers ), Information Systems Journal (ISJ) (Avison et al 2008), and Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR) (Dwivedi, Kiang et al 2008).…”