Introducing a new genre for EJIS

In this editorial I want to introduce a new manuscript genre for EJIS. This new genre is called “Clinical IS Research” and adds to the existing set of genres that was introduced some years ago (Te’eni et al., 2015).

The addition of this new genre follows the publication of the first issue of EJIS this year which was a special issue entitled “Clinical Research from Information Systems Practice”. The editors of this special issue define clinical IS research as “a research genre that generates knowledge from, and establishes the effectiveness of, practitioner-researcher interventions in achieving desired outcomes in information systems development, use, and management practice contexts” (Baskerville et al., 2023, p. 2). The editors say that their goal is “to move practitioner- researchers within the Information Systems discipline from being commentators and consumers of Information Systems research to having an active voice in producing research to inspire others within the field (Baskerville et al., 2023, p. 8).

I agree entirely with this goal. I believe that we, as IS scholars, need to engage with practitioners more effectively. One way of doing this is to encourage practitioners who have the required research training to contribute their knowledge and expertise to our academic journals.

This new genre on clinical IS research is described on the EJIS website as follows:

The Clinical IS Research genre provides opportunities for practitioner-researchers working in practice to offer their experiences and insights as contributions to the body of information systems knowledge. As such work is interventionist, it is necessarily empirical, and should be based on sound qualitative, quantitative, and/or design science research methods. Papers need to describe the authors’ experience, explain in which organizational context this experience took place, and specify by which methodology the evidence and conclusions were established.

For authors considering submitting clinical IS research manuscripts, there are four criteria that editors and reviewers will be using for assessing the research quality of their work: evidential validity, methodology rigour, knowledge contribution, and research transparency. These four criteria are explained more fully in the editorial accompanying the special issue (Baskerville et al., 2023).

I look forward to receiving – and publishing – clinical IS research articles in EJIS.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).