Leading Information Systems Journals Research Articles

Reimagining the Journal Editorial Process: An AI-Augmented Versus an AI-Driven Future

The editorial process at our leading information systems journals has been pivotal in shaping and growing our field. But this process has grown long in the tooth and is increasingly frustrating and challenging its various stakeholders: editors, reviewers, and authors. The sudden and explosive spread of AI tools, including advances in language models, make them a tempting fit in our efforts to ease and advance the editorial process. But we must carefully consider how the goals and methods of AI tools fit with the core purpose of the editorial process. We present a thought experiment exploring the implications of two distinct futures for the information systems powering today’s journal editorial process: an AI-augmented and an AI-driven one. The AI-augmented scenario envisions systems providing algorithmic predictions and recommendations to enhance human decision-making, offering enhanced efficiency while maintaining human judgment and accountability. However, it also requires debate over algorithm transparency, appropriate machine learning methods, and data privacy and security. The AI-driven scenario, meanwhile, imagines a fully autonomous and iterative AI. While potentially even more efficient, this future risks failing to align with academic values and norms, perpetuating data biases, and neglecting the important social bonds and community practices embedded in and strengthened by the human-led editorial process. We consider and contrast the two scenarios in terms of their usefulness and dangers to authors, reviewers, editors, and publishers. We conclude by cautioning against the lure of an AI-driven, metric-focused approach, advocating instead for a future where AI serves as a tool to augment human capacity and strengthen the quality of academic discourse. But more broadly, this thought experiment allows us to distill what the editorial process is about: the building of a premier research community instead of chasing metrics and efficiency. It is up to us to guard these values.

Editorial: Continuing on an Inclusive Path to Scholarly Excellence with Renewed Vigor

Editorial: Continuing on an Inclusive Path to Scholarly Excellence with Renewed Vigor

Artificial intelligence in E-Commerce: a bibliometric study and literature review.

This paper synthesises research on artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce and proposes guidelines on how information systems (IS) research could contribute to this research stream. To this end, the innovative approach of combining bibliometric analysis with an extensive literature review was used. Bibliometric data from 4335 documents were analysed, and 229 articles published in leading IS journals were reviewed. The bibliometric analysis revealed that research on AI in e-commerce focuses primarily on recommender systems. Sentiment analysis, trust, personalisation, and optimisation were identified as the core research themes. It also places China-based institutions as leaders in this researcher area. Also, most research papers on AI in e-commerce were published in computer science, AI, business, and management outlets. The literature review reveals the main research topics, styles and themes that have been of interest to IS scholars. Proposals for future research are made based on these findings. This paper presents the first study that attempts to synthesise research on AI in e-commerce. For researchers, it contributes ideas to the way forward in this research area. To practitioners, it provides an organised source of information on how AI can support their e-commerce endeavours.

Editorial Board Memberships: A Report on the Status of the Leading Information Systems Journals

Research journals play a significant role in the generation, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge in an academic discipline. To a great extent, the editorial board members of these research journals manage and control the generation, dissemination, and sharing of knowledge. They also act as policymakers, gatekeepers, and trendsetters. In their latter roles, editorial board members can influence several factors in a discipline; namely, the research topics, the research methods, the research scope, and whose articles are published. The primary goal of this study is to investigate and report on the status of the editorial boards memberships in a set of 14 leading Information Systems (IS) journals. The study does this along the following three main diversity elements namely titles, gender, academic institution, and the geographical location of the editorial boards’ members. The set of 14 journals include the IS basket of 8 journal list. Of the 14 reviewed journals, 7 are domiciled in the US and 7 in Europe. Results reveal a lack of common editorial board classification criteria whereby members of the editorial boards were categorized into different groups and referred to using various titles such as senior editors, associate editors, editorial board members, editorial review board members, and board of editors. Also, the results show that, as of June 2020, the 14 IS journals’ editorial boards had 1214 instances (988 unique occurrences) of editorial board members who came from 44 unique countries. Of those 988 editorial board members, 253 (26%) were females while 736 (74%) were males. In addition, out of the 988 editorial board members, 48% were from US and Canada, 26% were from Europe, and 26% were from the rest of the world. The results also reveal the schools and faculty with the highest number of editorial board memberships. Having a significant number of editorial board members from US and Europe (74%) fits with what Kubota (2019) called epistemological racism; a practice in which the Western world has an upper hand in determining and controlling knowledge and academic practices. Given the roles of the editorial boards in the review process and setting the research agenda for a journal, a more diverse editorial board might publish a more diverse research output. Furthermore, a more diverse editorial board is likely to have a repertoire of internal reviewers who speed up and lower the review process costs, which are challenges inherent in a less diverse editorial board.

Understanding Inconsistent Employee Compliance with Information Security Policies Through the Lens of the Extended Parallel Process Model

A key approach in many organizations to address the myriad of information security threats is encouraging employees to better understand and comply with information security policies (ISPs). Despite a significant body of academic research in this area, a commonly held but questionable assumption in these studies is that noncompliance simply represents the opposite of compliance. Hence, explaining compliance is only half of the story, and there is a pressing need to understand the causes of noncompliance, as well. If organizational leaders understood what leads a normally compliant employee to become noncompliant, future security breaches might be avoided or minimized. In this study, we found that compliant and noncompliant behaviors can be better explained by uncovering actions that focus not only on efficacious coping behaviors, but also those that focus on frustrated users who must sometimes cope with emotions, too. Employees working from a basis of emotion-focused coping are unable to address the threat and, feeling overwhelmed, focus only on controlling their emotions, merely making themselves feel better. Based on our findings, organizations can enhance their security by understanding the “tipping point” where employees’ focus likely changes from problem-solving to emotion appeasement, and instead push them into a more constructive direction.Yan Chen is an associate professor at Florida International University. She received her PhD in management information systems from University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her research focuses on information security management, online fraud, privacy, and social media. She has published more than 30 research papers in refereed academic journals and conference proceedings.Dennis F. Galletta is a LEO awardee, fellow, and former president of the Association for Information Systems and professor at University of Pittsburgh since 1985. He has published 108 articles and four books. He is a senior editor at MIS Quarterly and an editorial board member at the Journal of Management Information Systems, and has been on several other boards.Paul Benjamin Lowry is the Suzanne Parker Thornhill Chair Professor in Business Information Technology at the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech. He has published more than 135 journal articles. His research areas include organizational and behavioral security and privacy; online deviance and harassment, and computer ethics; human–computer interaction, social media, and gamification; and decision sciences, innovation, and supply chains.Xin (Robert) Luo is Endowed Regent’s Professor and full professor of MIS at the University of New Mexico. His research has appeared in leading information systems journals, and he serves as an associate editor for the Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Decision Sciences Journal, Information & Management, Electronic Commerce Research, and the Journal of Electronic Commerce Research.Gregory D. Moody is currently Lee Professor of Information Systems at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, and director of the cybersecurity graduate program. His interests include information systems security and privacy, e-business, and human–computer interaction. He is currently a senior editor for the Information Systems Journal and Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction.Robert Willison is a professor of management at Xi’an Jiaotong–Liverpool University. He received his PhD in information systems from the London School of Economics. His research focuses on insider computer abuse, information security policy compliance/noncompliance, software piracy, and cyber-loafing. His research has appeared in refereed academic journals such as MIS Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Information Systems Journal, and others.

A REVIEW ON COVID-19 RELATED RESEARCH IN LEADING INFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNALS

A REVIEW ON COVID-19 RELATED RESEARCH IN LEADING INFORMATION SYSTEMS JOURNALS

Bibliographic measures of top-tier finance and information systems journals

Purpose Pay, tenure and promotion decisions are frequently based upon inferences regarding the value of faculty research. Meanwhile, departmental, college and university reputations are frequently based on perceptions regarding the quality of research being produced by its faculty. Making correct inferences requires accurate measurement of research quality, which is often based upon the journal through which results are shared. This research expands upon the research found elsewhere through its detailed investigation of leading journals in two business disciplines, including examination of four different citation-based measures and four journal characteristics which are exogenous to the quality of any individual piece of research. The paper aims to discuss this issue. Design/methodology/approach This study assists in the development of an accurate perspective regarding research quality, by studying the popular Journal Citation Reports (JCR) impact factor. A further expansion on the past literature is consideration of three newer journal quality metrics: SCImago Journal Rank (SJR), Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and percentage of articles cited. Top-tier journals in finance and information systems are compared to evaluate the consistency of these measures across disciplines. Differences in journal characteristics and their impact on citation-rate based measures of quality are also examined. The potential impact of discipline-based variation in acceptance rate, issue frequency, the time since journal inception and total reviewers are put forth as additional potential exogenous factors that may impact the perception of journal quality. t-Tests are employed for discipline comparisons, while correlation and multiple regression are used for journal characteristic analysis. Findings There is a significant difference in the JCR impact measures of high-quality finance journals vs high-quality information systems journals, which are correlated with a variety of journal-specific factors including the journal’s acceptance rate and frequency of issue. Information systems journals domination of finance journals persists whether one considers mean, median, minimum or maximum impact factors. SJR measures for finance journals are consistently higher than information systems journals, though the SJR value of any individual journal can be quite volatile. By comparison, the SNIP metric rates premier information systems journals higher. Over 12 percent more of the articles in leading information systems journals are cited during the initial three years. Research limitations/implications Logical extensions of this research include examining journals in other business disciplines. One could also evaluate quality measures reaction to variation in journal characteristics (i.e. changes in acceptance rates). Furthermore, one could include other measures of journal quality, including the recently released CiteScore metric. Such research will build on the present research and improve the accuracy of research quality assessment. Practical implications To the extent that citation-based research measures and journal-specific factors vary across disciplines as demonstrated by our investigation, discipline-specific traits should be considered adjusted for, when making inferences about the long-term value of recently published research. For instance, finance faculty publishing in journals with JCR readings of 2.0 are in journals that are 53 percent above the discipline’s average, while information systems faculty publishing in journals with JCR readings of 2.0 are in journals that are 18 percent below the discipline’s average. Furthermore, discipline-specific differences in journal characteristics, leading to differences in citation-based quality measures, should be considered when making inferences about the long-term value of recently published research in the process of making recommendations regarding salary adjustments, retention and promotion. Social implications Quantity and quality of research are two hallmarks of leading research institutions. Assessing research quality is very problematic because its definition has changed from being based on review process (i.e. blind refereed), to acceptance rates, to impact factors. Furthermore, the impact factor construct has been a lightning rod of controversy as researchers, administrators and journals themselves argue over which metric to employ. This research is attempting to assess how impact factors and journal characteristics may influence the impact factors, and how these interactions vary business discipline. The research is especially important and relevant to the authors which separately chair departments including finance and information systems faculty, and therefore are in roles requiring assessment of faculty research productivity including quality. Originality/value This study is a detailed analysis of bibliographic aspects of the top-tier journals in two quantitative business areas. In addition to the popular JCR, SJR and SNIP measures of performance, the analysis studies the seldom-examined percentage of the article cited metric. A deeper understanding of citation-based measures is obtained though the evaluation of changes in how journals have been rated on these metrics over time. The research shows that there are discipline-related systematic differences in both citation-based research measures and journal-specific factors and that these discipline-specific traits should be considered when making inferences about the long-term value of recently published research. Furthermore, discipline-specific difference in journal characteristics, leading to differences in citation-based quality measures, should be considered when making personnel and remuneration decisions.

Evolution of information systems research: Insights from topic modeling

Information systems (IS) research has continued to consistently evolve with the transitions in the IS discipline over time. There has been a general interest in the IS discipline over time as researchers have examined various aspects such as the intellectual core, diversity, and impact of IS research. On the basis of 2962 articles published in six leading IS journals between 2003 and 2017, topic modeling using latent semantic indexing was applied to author-supplied keywords. Topics such as IS development, IT adoption, and IS usage had endured over time; topics such as e-commerce and IT outsourcing had gained momentum and then waned over time; and topics such as social media, design science, and online communities have gained momentum in recent times. Results suggest that IS research has evolved considerably over time and generally included new frontiers while serving its core strength and identity.

The Sociotechnical Axis of Cohesion for the IS Discipline: Its Historical Legacy and its Continued Relevance

The sociotechnical perspective is often seen as one of the foundational viewpoints—or an “axis of cohesion”— for the Information Systems (IS) discipline, contributing to both its distinctiveness and its ability to coherently expand its boundaries. However, our review of papers in the two leading IS journals from 2000 to 2016 suggests that IS research has lost sight of the discipline’s sociotechnical character—a character that was widely acknowledged at the discipline’s inception. This is a problem because an axis of cohesion can be fundamental to a discipline’s long-term vitality. In order to address this issue, we offer ways to renew the sociotechnical perspective so that it can continue to serve as a distinctive and coherent foundation for the discipline. Our hope is that the renewed sociotechnical frame for the IS discipline discussed in the paper holds potential to contribute to the enduring strength of our diverse, distinctive, yet unified discipline. It also prompts members of the discipline to think more deeply about what it means to be an IS scholar.

About Our Authors

About Our Authors

About Our Authors

About Our Authors

Analyzing Information Systems Security Research to Find Key Topics, Trends, and Opportunities

What are the key topics for Information Systems (IS) security researchers? How have these topics been changing, and what topics are emerging to offer new opportunities for research? We address these questions by analyzing the abstracts of 261 articles focusing on IS security that have appeared in leading IS journals and journals devoted to this area. Using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to analyze the text of these abstracts uncovers five primary research topics: Security Design & Management, Business Operations Security, Behavioral Aspects, Authentication & Integrity Controls, and Prevention & Detection. These five primary topics are aggregates of more granular topics that are utilized to find trends to understand the changing complexion of IS security research. Our study contributes by developing the key topics and their trends in this area using an analytical and replicable method to synthesize the existing research.

Style composition in action research publication

Examining action research publications in leading Information Systems journals as a particular genre of research communication, we develop the notion of style composition to understand how authors ...

Style Composition in Action Research Publication

Examining action research publications in leading Information Systems journals as a particular genre of research communication, we develop the notion of style composition to understand how authors structure their arguments for a research contribution. We define style composition as the activity through which authors select, emphasize, and present elements of their research to establish premises, develop inferences, and present contributions in publications. Drawing on this general notion, we identify a set of styles that is characteristic of how IS action researchers compose their argument. Premise styles relate to the dual goals of action research through practical or theoretical positioning of the argument; inference styles combine insights from the problem-solving and the research cycles through inductive or deductive reasoning; and contribution styles focus on different types of contributions--experience report, field study, theoretical development, problemsolving method, and research method. Based on the considered sample, we analyze the styles adopted in selected publications and show that authors have favored certain styles while leaving others underexplored; further, we reveal important strengths and weaknesses in the composition of styles within the IS discipline. Based on these insights, we discuss how action research practices and writing can be improved, as well as how to further develop style compositions to support the publication of engaged scholarship research.

Towards the improved treatment of generalization of knowledge claims in IS research: drawing general conclusions from samples

This paper presents a framework for justifying generalization in information systems (IS) research. First, using evidence from an analysis of two leading IS journals, we show that the treatment of generalization in many empirical papers in leading IS research journals is unsatisfactory. Many quantitative studies need clearer definition of populations and more discussion of the extent to which ‘significant’ statistics and use of non-probability sampling affect support for their knowledge claims. Many qualitative studies need more discussion of boundary conditions for their sample-based general knowledge claims. Second, the proposed new framework is presented. It defines eight alternative logical pathways for justifying generalizations in IS research. Three key concepts underpinning the framework are the need for researcher judgment when making any claim about the likely truth of sample-based knowledge claims in other settings; the importance of sample representativeness and its assessment in terms of the knowledge claim of interest; and the desirability of integrating a study's general knowledge claims with those from prior research. Finally, we show how the framework may be applied by researchers and reviewers. Observing the pathways in the framework has potential to improve both research rigour and practical relevance for IS research.

An historically grounded critical analysis of research articles in IS

In order to explore scientific writing in Information Systems (IS) journals, we adopt a combination of historical and rhetorical approaches. We first investigate the history of universities, business schools, learned societies and scientific articles. This perspective allows us to capture the legacy of scientific writing standards, which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Then, we focus on two leading IS journals (EJIS and MISQ). An historical analysis of both outlets is carried out, based on data related to their creation, evolution of editorial statements, and key epistemological and methodological aspects. We also focus on argumentative strategies found in a sample of 436 abstracts from both journals. Three main logical anchorages (sometimes combined) are identified, and related to three argumentative strategies: ‘deepening of knowledge’, ‘solving an enigma’ and ‘addressing a practical managerial issue’. We relate these writing norms to historical imprints of management and business studies, in particular: enigma-focused rhetorics, interest in institutionalized literature, neglect for managerially grounded rhetoric and lack of reflexivity in scientific writing. We explain this relation as a quest for academic legitimacy. Lastly, some suggestions are offered to address the discrepancies between these writing norms and more recent epistemological and theoretical stances adopted by IS researchers.

A review of research on e-marketplaces 1997–2008

Electronic marketplaces are an important research theme on the information systems landscape. In this paper we examine twelve years of research on electronic marketplaces in leading information systems journals. The research articles are classified according to five conceptual high level groupings: electronic markets theory; system perspective with a focus on the technology or functionality with the system; adoption and implementation issues; organisational implications; and broader e-commerce issues. The findings show an increase in electronic marketplace (e-marketplace) research over the twelve years. The analysis of the literature highlights two distinct issues that researchers in the information systems discipline need to address. The first is the lack of research on the fundamental questions on the nature of electronic markets and their efficiency. If information systems research does not address this question then it will not be seen as tackling critical issues by those outside of the discipline. The second is the relative lack of articles on the organisational implications of adopting and managing electronic marketplaces. These include, the organisational benefits, costs and risks of trading through e-marketplaces and strategies and methodologies for managing organisational participation. Both issues can be addressed by increasing the number of macro studies examining efficiencies in electronic markets.

Rethinking organisational size in IS research: meaning, measurement and redevelopment

While organisational size is a popular construct in information systems (IS) research, findings from its use have been inconsistent. Few studies have explored this inconsistency or attempted to address this problem. This paper uses Churchill's measure development paradigm to conduct three separate but related investigations into the size construct. Study 1 explored the domain and dimensions of size. Some 2000 research papers published in six leading IS journals over an 11-year period were read in order to determine what researchers thought size meant and how they measured it. The study found 21 constructs underpinning the size construct and 25 ways of measuring size, but no clear relationship between size meaning and measurement. Study 2 assessed the construct's content validity using a concept map exercise involving 41 participants. Multidimensional scaling clustered the constructs into three conceptual groups. Study 3 administered the size construct in a survey with a sample of 163 Australian firms. The study found that the data supported the constructs observed in Study 2 and that a group of eight constructs could be used to differentiate between smaller and larger firms in the sample. Analysis revealed that organisational levels, risk aversion, geographic distribution and employment reflected respondents’ self-nominated size.

The IS Identity Crisis

Defining the central identity of the information systems (IS) field is a subject of ongoing concern and debate among IS researchers. Published empirical studies to date have focused on restricted sets of IS-related journal publications spread across relatively short time periods. This paper offers a broader review of the central identity of the IS field, using three dimensions proposed by Albert and Whetten [1985]: central character (i.e., what topics do IS scholars research?); temporal continuity (i.e., to what extent has the identity of the IS field remained static over time?); and distinctiveness (i.e., how unique is research published in IS vs. non-IS research journals?). The first two dimensions are examined using a dataset containing 6,466 journal citations drawn from seven leading IS journals over a 32-year period, and the third is evaluated by comparing results from these seven journals with research published in 15 leading non-IS business journals over the same time period. Results suggest that articles published in leading IS journals do share a strong central character that is distinct from research published in non-IS journals, and yet an identity that has continually shifted over time. This study contributes to the literature by providing an empirically supported review of who we are, how we are different, and some thoughts about where we may be going as a discipline.

Diversity or Identity Crisis? An Examination of Leading IS Journals

Since its founding in the 1960s, the Information Systems (IS) field has been involved in critical debates about the nature and future of the discipline. Many researchers feel that diversity in IS research is our strength; others fear that too much diversity leads to losing the field's core identity. Do the scholarly contributions of the IS community reveal either of these two phenomena? In order to address this question, we examine articles published in leading IS journals (MISQ, ISR, and JMIS) during the period of 2000 to 2006. Our analysis includes classifying the articles using a classification scheme that includes the consideration of IT artifact, the research methods used, and the research topics covered. We provide descriptive statistics following a content analysis procedure and results based on cluster analysis and association rule mining. Our results provide an update on previous findings on IT artifact and its consideration in IS publications. Our results further suggest that while our leading journals cover a broad range of research topics and methods, there is also evidence of popularity on some topics and research methods.