this IS research

Jason Thatcher is back on the show and he is bringing decades of experiences as a journal editor. So we decided we play a game of round robin where each of us is giving rules of what to do (or not to do) as an editor. How long can we sit on papers before we make decisions? On what basis should we offer revise and resubmit decisions? When is it okay to desk reject a paper? How many reviews are enou...

Is it okay to use large language models in the research process? For what task, exactly, and to automate the task or to augment the researcher? In this episode, we try to explore whether and how LLMs could be used in five aspects of the research process - for paper writing, reviewing, data analysis, as a subject of research, or as a surrogate for research subjects. We also discuss whether they sho...

Is there a formula for doing and publishing research on digital phenomena? And if so, it is the same formula as the scripts for IS papers of the past, or has it changed? We discuss how our field has historically worked with reference theories from other disciplines and how we have moved beyond this one way of doing and publishing research to a variety of ways in which we can build theory about dig...

Our field of information systems is in the fortunate position that we have our own independent and self-governed association (we have more than one, in fact), which publishes one of the true top journals of our field, which means that the journal is entirely in our control as members. But as Monideepa Tarafdar, the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems a...

Nick is traveling, Jan is sick - no time to produce a new episode in time. But fear not, we still have a giant archive of episodes that you may have forgotten or not even heard so far. So we picked five of our best episodes and link to them below so that you can re-visit them, or maybe you haven't even gotten around to listening to them yet. All episodes can be found on the major podcasting platfo...

Is the journal publishing process and the "game" around journal publishing forcing us to give up on big ideas and instead work on small ideas about trivial matters? We are not so sure. We think that science needs many different types of academics, and they have all sorts of different ideas, big and small, and we need outlets for expressing every single one of them. But outlets, like ideas, are not...

One of the main reasons article submissions get desk-rejected by journals is for lack of fit. But what does that actually mean? And how can we figure this out before we submit our work? Well there are several tests you can do to evaluate the fitness of your work to an information systems journal: you can evaluate whether you are writing about a discourse that already takes place in information sys...

Look at what Santa dropped when he came down the chimney last night. A bunch of valuable ThisISResearch Best paper Awards! As we do at the end of every year, we look back at the finest information systems scholarship our field has produced this year, and we pick some of our favorite papers that we want to give an award too. Like in previous years, we recognize three different kinds of best papers...

What do academics have to offer that practitioners do not already have? They have the data academics want. They can analyse it by themselves, sometimes better than academics. They are also not reading our articles. So why would academics bother engaging with them? Why should we even bridge that perceived or existing gap between theory and practice? Because academics need to dip their toes into pra...

You set up an assumption, you have a theory, you analyze your data, and you show that the assumption does not hold. Doing good qualitative research is that simple. Except that it's not, of course. On the ground, in the research and writing process, these basic rules can be quite tricky to implement. So we discuss some heuristics researchers can use to limit their conversants, settle on suitable th...

Did you know there is someone who published a MIS Quarterly paper in its inaugural issue in 1977 and has another one forthcoming in 2024? Hard to fathom but Izak Benbasat has published at least one paper in our top journal in every decade of its existence. Izak has been doing IS scholarship for almost fifty years, which makes him the perfect researcher to talk to about how the field has changed, w...

We continue our discussion around theorizing about digital phenomena and publishing conceptual papers. Today, we are joined by Robert Gregory, who has published several theoretical articles on digital technology in Academy of Management Review. He is also an AMR editor for a special issue on AI in management and he heads the Theory section as senior editor in the Journal of the Association for Inf...

Editorials are spaces in journals where the key stewards of the field leave advice for others about what type of research the journals they lead are looking to publish. We discuss some of our favorite editorials and dissect the advice to dish out for finding important research problems, theorizing effectively, and writing persuasively. References Rai, A. (2016). Celebrating 40 Years of MIS Quarter...

Conceptual papers that offer new theories are hard to write and even harder to publish. You do not have empirical data to back up your arguments, which makes the papers easy to reject in the review cycle. We are also typically not well trained in theorizing, and there isn't even a clear process to theorizing we could learn or follow. Does that mean that we shouldn't even try to write theory papers...

Did you know that when you spend time on an online platform, you could be experiencing between six to eight different experimental treatments that stem from several hundred A/B tests that run concurrently? That's how common digital experimentation is today. And while this may be acceptable in industry, large-scale digital experimentation poses some substantial challenges for researchers wanting to...

We are back with the usual dose of fortnightly folksy academic wisdom sprinkled in with some serious and substantive conversations. We kick this new season off by discussing observations we made at this year's Academy of Management conference in Chicago. We talk about how to get the most out of doctoral and junior faculty consortia, how to pick which session to go to, how papers get reviewed at co...

Many people think of summer as the best time to read. On the beach, on the airplane to a vacation, in between semesters… Sounds like a perfect time to do a literature review. But there are many ways to do a literature review, and in all honesty, we think most people choose the wrong type of review – the "systematic" literature review where they select papers about a phenomenon, do a supposedly str...

Time to reflect a bit. After our conversations with three excellent but very different IS researchers, we sit down and ponder the lessons we learnt from the three previous podcasts with Jan vom Brocke, Shaila Miranda, and Jason Thatcher. So did we learn anything? You betcha. We talk about the balancing humble scholarship with the need to popularize important new insights, the difference between ri...

Behavioral research is alive and well ... online Some time ago, we wondered whether survey research is dead. Today, we speak with Jason Thatcher, who argues the exact opposite. He gives us plenty of advice on how to design online experiments, sample rigorously on platforms like Prolific, build reliable psychometric measurements, and embed surveys in robust research designs. And because Jason is no...

Shaila Miranda is with us today. She has done some amazing theory construct research using computational methods before this was really an accepted thing. We discuss which work she built her research around to give it legitimacy, what good stopping rules are for authors or reviewers to know when enough is enough, and how we can engage in humble generalizations of interesting and general regulariti...

According to the internet, Elon Musk is often praised for his visionary mindset, innovation, risk-taking attitude, and energy. Jan vom Brocke is just like that, we think. With the positivity he brings into every project and meeting, Jan has been right at the center of many seminal developments in our field over the past twenty years, from the rise of design science to the inception of NeuroIS, the...

In science, citations are used to give credit to sources that are relevant to the topic that is being discussed where the citation appears. They are a key vehicle through which we establish a cumulative knowledge tradition – we use them to acknowledge material that informs our arguments. But citations are much more than that. They have become a key metric of academic success in their own right, pr...

Research is a conversation. Every scholar must become a professional writer. But how do we learn these things? Most graduate school programs do not include a writing course and books on how to write are read even less than other types of books. Is good writing maybe all either genetics or just experience? Or does it depend on how we approach research, either phenomena- or theory-driven? We think b...

The thing is, special issues are special. Hence the name. But what is it that makes them special? We look at some of the hottest special issues out there for information systems researchers and we discuss three key aspects of special issues – topical fit, competition, and process – that provide both advantages and disadvantages to researchers thinking about submitting to them. And for some weird r...

Jan has a boy crush on IS Econ researchers while Nick thinks they reduce all phenomena to regressions. Time to put both myths – and a few others – to rest. We brought on the inimitable and wonderful Gordon Burtch and Brad Greenwood to talk about everything you ever wanted to know about economics, econometrics, difference-in-difference designs, mechanism identifications, analytical modeling, and fo...