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The Journal of Information Systems: a review of the first 15 years.

Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT: The publication of the Spring 2001 issue marks the completion of the first 15 years of the Journal of Information Systems (JIS). This paper analyzes the content of articles published, the research methods used, the sources referenced, and impact of articles published in JIS. The analyses provide insights concerning the development of accounting information systems research that should be of interest not only to readers of and contributors to JIS, but also to current and prospective doctoral students who are interested in the field of accounting information systems. Accounting researchers specializing in other disciplines may also find this paper beneficial in understanding the research interests of their accounting information systems colleagues.

I. INTRODUCTION

In 1986, the Information Systems Section of the American Accounting Association created the Journal of Information Systems (JIS) to provide an outlet for accounting information systems research. The publication of the Spring 2001 issue marked the completion of the first 15 years of the existence of JIS. This paper reviews and analyzes the content of those first 15 years to identify and discuss JIS's contribution to the development and dissemination of research about accounting information systems (AIS). As the official journal of the Information Systems Section of the American Accounting Association, JIS is regarded as one of the premier outlets for AIS research. Indeed, JIS is typically included in studies that seek to assess overall scholarly productivity of accounting faculty (Hasselback and Reinstein 1995; Zivney et al. 1995). JIS is also included in all three recent studies (Hardgrave and Walstrom 1997; Mylonopoulos and Theoharakis 2001; Whitman et al. 1999) that assessed the perceived quality of informa tion systems journals. Thus, examination of JIS is likely to provide insights about important trends and developments in AIS research in general.

The next section describes the method we use to analyze the content of JIS. The following section presents and discusses the results of our analyses. The last section summarizes our findings and conclusions.

II. METHOD

This paper categorizes the topics, research methods, references, and citations of articles published in the first 15 years of JIS. Mitchusson and Steinbart (1993) conducted a similar analysis of the first five years of JIS. Their analysis examined ten issues of the journal, beginning with the Fall 1986 issue and concluding with the Spring 1991 issue. This paper extends that analysis through the Spring 2001 issue. (1) For many of the analyses, we separately examine three five-year periods, each of which includes ten issues of JIS, in order to identify trends.

We manually created the database used in our analyses, including the first ten issues of JJS that Mitchusson and Steinbart (1993) analyzed (2) One of the authors constructed the database, and three graduate assistants checked it for accuracy and completeness.

Each author independently classified the articles by research topic. (3) Overall, inter-rater agreement was quite high, with 145 (91.2 percent) of the 159 articles being assigned to the same major topic category. In addition, we agreed on the subtopical classification of 99 (86.1 percent) of the 115 articles in the categories that contained subcategories. We resolved all differences by discussion and re-examination of the article in question.

III. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

This section begins with an analysis of the overall structure of JIS. We then present the results of our analyses of the research methods used and topics investigated. Next, we examine the institutional affiliations and source disciplines of the authors who published in JIS. The final set of analyses examines the sources used by researchers publishing in JIS as well as the citations of JIS articles.

Overall Structure of JIS

JIS contains three sections: Academic, (4) Practice, and Education. Table 1 shows the number of articles published in each section overtime. Two trends are apparent: (1) a decline in the total number of articles published in JIS, and (2) a shift in the proportion of articles appearing in each section.

Examination of Table 1 reveals that most of the decline in the number of articles published in JIS is due to a decrease in articles appearing in the Practice and Education sections of the journal. Whereas less than half of the articles published in the first ten issues (five years) of JIS appeared in the Academic section, approximately 75 percent of the articles published in the subsequent 20 issues (ten years) appeared in that section. Mitchusson and Steinbart (1993, 36) note that this shift began in 1989; Table 1 shows that this shift stabilized during the period 1991-1996.

An examination of editorial comments published during the 1990s, as well as in the Spring 2001 issue (Murthy and Wiggins 2001), suggests that the shift in focus to primarily Academic section articles is not due to a change in editorial philosophy. Thus, the decline in the number and proportion of articles published in the Practice and Education sections of 115 must reflect a change in submissions to those sections. The development of the IS Section's web site as a vehicle for sharing syllabi and course outlines may account for some of the decline in the number of articles published in the Education section. Indeed, three of the Education section articles published in the first five years of JIS were syllabi and course outlines, and four other articles described the design of either one specific course or a sequence of courses at a specific academic institution. Author perceptions may be another factor influencing submissions. For example, if AIS faculty perceive that publishing in the Practice and Education s ections of JIS is less beneficial for promotion and tenure decisions than publishing in the Academic section, then they will likely submit more articles to the latter section.

Table 1 also shows that the number of articles published in the Academic section of the journal has declined over time. One possible explanation for this decline is that publication delays during the mid-1990s (5) may have made some AIS researchers reluctant to submit their work to AIS. Another explanation is the establishment of other journals devoted to publishing AIS research. One such alternative outlet for AIS research is the International Journal of Accounting Information Systems (IJAIS, formerly Advances in Accounting Information Systems), which published its first issue in 1992. Table 2 shows the number of articles published in the Academic section of JIS and the number of articles published in IJAIS over time. The data provide some support for both of the previous suggested explanations of the decline in the number of articles published in the Academic section of JIS during the 1990s. The total number of articles published in the two journals during the 1990s is considerably higher than the number of articles published in the Academic section of JIS during the five-year period preceding the establishment of IJAIS. At the same time, the relative number of articles published in JIS vs. IJAIS declined, which may reflect a change in authors' preferences.

Content Analysis

This section examines the research topics addressed and methods used in published JIS articles. We exclude the commissioned articles (6) from these analyses because they were intended to stimulate research on specific topics and, therefore, to change the focus of AIS research. In a subsequent section, we will use citation analysis to evaluate how well the commissioned articles achieved this objective.

Research Topics

Table 3 classifies by topic all articles published in JIS for the period 1986-2001. Our broad topic categories are as follows: (7)

* Organization and Management of an IS: Issues related to the various stages of the systems development life cycle. Examples include top management involvement in planning, the use of charge-back systems, and evaluating system effectiveness.

* Internal Control and Auditing: Issues related to the design and evaluation of internal controls in information systems, or to the use of various types of audit tools and techniques to...

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