Information systems as a discipline in the making: comparing EJIS and MISQ between 1995 and 2008

The status of Information Systems (IS) as a discipline has been widely debated as a body of knowledge that offers a number of concepts, methods and techniques to understand and improve the roles of information communication systems and technologies in organizations. Current state of this debate as reported in academic journals signals an imperative to ground some of the perspectives in relation to what IS professionals use in practice in different cultural and geographical contexts. This paper aims to contribute to the debate by tracing the unfolding of information systems as a body of knowledge using the ideas of Abbott on disciplines. We use three different stages of a discipline's development: differentiation, conflict and absorption and map them using a citation and co-citation analyses of two main IS journals (EJIS and MISQ) in the period between 1995 and 2008. Our results indicate that dominant ideas and models to investigate IS phenomena emerged over time are behavioural based and study IS adoption/acceptance/rejection in organisations, many of which are predictive and thus lending themselves usable for positivistic quantitative and qualitative research. There are however stable varieties within IS building on interpretivism and constructivism that we need to recognise and reignite in order to ensure that this field continues moving forward, in particular in studying current and future processes of innovation and diffusion of technology worldwide. (author's abstract)