Diversity or Identity Crisis? An Examination of Leading IS Journals

Abstract

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.