Research in Information Systems Education: Scope and Productivity

Abstract

Information systems (IS) education research is an integral partof the IS academic community. Research on timely issues such as techniques for innovative teaching, methods for addressing the recent enrollment crisis, and revisions to the IS curriculum are vital to the IS discipline. This paper defines the scope of information systems education research and identifies the top research journals that publish research related to information systems education. Ultimately, this paper reports on research productivity in information systems education at both the institutional and individual faculty levels for the period 2005-2010. The results of this paper suggest that IS education research is global in nature with several leading institutions outside of North America including universities in Australia, Belgium, Greece, Hong Kong, Israel, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom. In addition, several universities prominent in overall IS research productivity were also prominent in IS education research.

Key Authors in Business and Management Education Research: Productivity, Topics, and Future Directions

“…We selected the ten BME journals with the highest hg ‐index scores (Arbaugh & Bielinska‐Kwapisz, ) as the base of our final journal pool. To address critiques offered by previous studies about insufficient journal or disciplinary area representation (Rynes & Brown, ; Urbancic, ; Kruck et al., ), we then included additional journals to ensure that our sampling pool encompassed at least two of the top BME journals for each of the seven major disciplinary areas (accounting, economics, finance, information systems, management, marketing, and operations/ supply chain management). These additional journals were determined by their ranking metrics in their respective disciplinary areas: Marketing Education Review ( MER ), the Journal of Financial Education ( JFEd ), International Review of Economics Education ( IREE ), the Journal of Economics and Finance Education ( JEFE ), and the International Journal of Information and Operations Management Education ( IJIOME ).…”

“…Previous multi‐journal BME author studies have taken an “all journals are equal” approach, and used simple un‐weighted single author and/or weighted co‐author counts when assessing scholarly productivity (Urbancic, ; Abernethy & Padgett, ; Kruck et al., ). For our study, we provided an un‐weighted co‐author score for each article, but we also used a weighted author score to account for the number of co‐authors in an article (sole authors were weighted as 1, two co‐authors were each weighted as 0.5, etc.).…”

“…Because these studies employed small journal pools, relative journal quality has not been considered in their research designs. Accounting, economics, and marketing have relatively well‐developed histories of studying BME scholarly productivity (Clark & Hanna, ; Urbancic, ; McIntyre & Tanner, ; Lo et al., ); whereas information systems and finance have fewer studies (Chan & Thapa, ; Kruck et al., ). At the other end of the spectrum, we found no studies of BME scholarly productivity in management.…”

“…Previous efforts to identify the most prominent authors in BME research have typically examined articles published in the 1980s and 1990s, and tended to focus on either a single journal or a single business discipline (McIntyre & Tanner Jr., ; Holderness, Myers, Summers, & Wood, ). Recent author‐tracking efforts (e.g., Urbancic, ; Abernethy & Padgett, ; Kruck, Mathieu, & Mitri, ; Holderness Jr. et al., ; Lo, Wong, Mixon & Asarta, ) still focus largely on single domains, thereby limiting the extent to which their findings could help promote cross‐disciplinary work.…”

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: Changing the Dominant Narrative About (and In) Research Institutions

“…Our prior work is relatively straightforward, using article and author counts within a journal quality-weighting formula (also see Arbaugh et al, 2017; Asarta et al, 2017). Building on single-discipline institutional productivity studies (Abernethy & Padgett, 2011; Holderness, Myers, Summers, & Wood, 2014; Kruck, Mathieu, & Mitri, 2013; Lo et al, 2015) and following Currie and Pandher’s (2013) journal listing and quality-weighting formulae, we compiled the top journals (by citation indices and hg -index; see Arbaugh & Bielinska-Kwapisz, 2016) in each major BME discipline, including accounting, economics, finance, information systems, management, marketing, and operations/supply chain management. Our selection criteria resulted in 17 top BME journals being included for analysis.…”