An Argument-Based Analysis of Communicating Academic Findings to Practitioners

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The AIS InPractice merged with Science2Practice in 2020. The new institution now translates articles published in AIS journals into Insights to publicize academic findings. Similarly, MISQ and ISR have a joint initiative with Sloan Management Review to translate academic papers into articles published in SMR. Despite these significant efforts in the IS field, little has been done to investigate whether academic findings have been communicated effectively to practitioners by these disciplinary endeavors. Against this backdrop, we apply Toulmin’s argument framework to discuss two different ways to support a knowledge claim, i.e., warrant-establishing and warrant-using. We then conduct an empirical study to examine how leading academic journals in the IS field rewrite their published articles for a practitioner audience. We found two problems in these communications: First, when academic articles are rewritten as warrant-establishing arguments, scientific methods are often not included. Second, when academic articles are rewritten as warrant-using arguments, the findings are not compared to existing practices. Based on our analysis, we propose that future communication could follow a knowledge flyer style focusing on comparing academic findings with existing practices. Also, we propose a Master of Philosophy program which could be an effective pedagogical effort to educate IS practitioners.