Analyzing IS research productivity: an inclusive approach to global IS scholarship

Abstract

An increasing number of studies have appeared that evaluate and rank journal quality and the productivity of IS scholars and their institutions. In this paper, we describe the results of one recent study identifying the ‘Top 30’ IS Researchers, revealing many unexamined assumptions about which IS publication outlets should be included in any definition of high-quality, scholarly IS journals. Drawing from the argument that all categories and classification schemes are grounded in politics, we critique the process by which the recent study in question (and several earlier studies) have derived the set of journals from which they count researcher publications. Based on a critical examination of the widespread inclusion of practitioner outlets, and the consistent exclusion of European scholarly IS journals, we develop our own arguments for which journals should be included in such evaluations of researcher productivity. We conduct our own analysis of IS researcher productivity for the period 1999–2003, based on articles published in a geographically balanced set of 12 IS journals, and then we compare our results with those from the recent study in question and their predecessors. Our results feature a more diverse set of scholars – both in terms of location (specifically, the country and continent in which the researchers are employed) and gender. We urge future studies of IS research productivity to follow our practice of including high-quality European journals, while eschewing practitioner-oriented publications (such as Harvard Business Review and Communications of the ACM). We also advocate that such studies count only research contributions (e.g., research articles), and that other genres of non-research articles – such as book reviews, ‘issues and opinions’ pieces and editorial introductions – not be conflated with counts of research contributions.

Keywords:

• IS faculty
• research productivity
• global scholarship

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Jing Guo, M.S. candidate in Actuarial Sciences at Georgia State University for her help with data collection, and also Sun Lim Lee, MBA student at Baruch College, City University of New York. We also wish to thank Cecil Chua, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, for making the GSU Bibliographic Repository available to us, Dave Naumann from the University of Minnesota for providing an archival version of the ISWorld Faculty Directory, and Pete Tinsley, Executive Director of AIS, for access to AIS membership records. An earlier version of this paper was submitted to the IFIP 8.2 Working Group conference on Social Inclusion: Societal and Organizational Implications for Information Systems held in July 2006. This compares to Huang & Hsu's (2005) study for the same period of time, but with a different basket of journals, which featured no European authors among their “Top 30” list of most productive IS researchers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael J Gallivan

About the authors

Michael J. Gallivan is an associate professor in the CIS Department at Georgia State University in the Robinson College of Business in Atlanta. He received his Ph.D. degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests are in the management of IT personnel, including issues of gender and racial diversity, IT outsourcing, IT adoption, implementation, and training. His research has been published in MIS Quarterly Journal of Management Information Systems, Information & Management, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Information Technology & People, and Information and Organization.

Raquel Benbunan-Fich

Raquel Benbunan-Fich is an associate professor of Information Systems at the Zicklin School of Business, Baruch College, City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. in Management Information Systems from Rutgers University, Graduate School of Management. Her research interests include computer-mediated group collaboration, technology-mediated learning, evaluation of Web-based systems, and research productivity of IS faculty. Her research has been published in Communications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, Information & Management, International Journal of Electronic Commerce and other journals.