Introduction

The field of information systems (IS) research has been developing ever since the first commercial applications of information and communication technologies were introduced in the early 1950s (see Caminer et al. (1998); and Ferry (2003) for accounts of the world's first business computer, LEO, developed in the U.K. in 1951, running the first business applications software Glass (2005)). Arising initially from the field of computer science and developing through the application of concepts from cognate fields of study such as organisation science, operational research, management, strategy, psychology, systems thinking and the like (Buckingham et al., 1987), interest in IS soon gained momentum. Technological and application developments of IS are traced in Somogyi & Galliers (1987) and are updated in Galliers & Leidner (2003, pp. 1–24).

Early U.S. journals dealing with aspects of IS included Communications of the ACM (first published in 1958), and as the academic field developed, The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems (1970), MIS Quarterly (1977), and more recently, the Journal of Management Information Systems (1984) and Information Systems Research (1990).

In Europe, the academic field was somewhat slower to develop in terms of journals, with Information & Management (1963) leading the way. In the U.K., a number of journals emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Journal of Information Technology (first published in 1986), Information Systems Journal (known as Journal of Information Systems until 1994), European Journal of Information Systems and Journal of Strategic Information Systems (all appearing for the first time in 1991). Other important European journals, include the German language Wirtschaftsinformatik and the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (Mylonopoulos & Theoharakis, 2001).

Mirroring the introduction of journals, the first specifically IS conference – the annual Scandinavian IS Research Seminar (IRIS) – took place in 1978. (The more broadly focussed Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences predates IRIS by some 10 years, having celebrated its 40th anniversary in January 2007). The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) followed in 1980. More recently other regional conferences were also founded, including the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS), the Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) and, of course the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS).

The origins of ECIS can be traced back to two parallel initiatives to launch a conference for European researchers in IS. The first initiative was led by Professor Dan Remenyi, then at Henley Management College, with the second arising from discussions following the publication of the European Journal of Information Systems by the U.K.'s Operational Research Society. The editors of EJIS were based at the LSE at the time, and Edgar Whitley began working with the OR Society to organise a European conference that covered the same area as the new journal. Professor Frank Land learned of both initiatives and helped ensure that rather than duplicating work, the two initiatives merged and led to the first ECIS. This was held at Henley Management College in 1993. Frank Land was also closely involved in the formation of the ECIS standing committee (ECIS, 2007), which has responsibility for selecting forthcoming ECIS venues and for ensuring the ongoing success of the ECIS conferences. With the foundation of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) (AIS, 2007) in 1994, PACIS and ECIS were recognised as regional AIS conferences and the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) was established to complement these already existing conferences. The U.K. Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) was a separate but related development, and predated AIS by a year. Other, country-specific European IS associations include the French L'Association Information et Management (AIM), founded in 1991. In the German speaking world, the Wirtschaftinformatik conference has been run biennially since the 1993 conference held in Münster.

Despite this increase in activity within the European IS academy, very little was known about the range of research interests and favoured journals for European academics that can be used as a basis for international comparisons. This is in marked contrast to a long-standing tradition in the U.S. of analysis of the quality, standing of and citations in their journals (e.g., Davis, 1980; Hamilton & Ives, 1980; Nunamaker, 1980; Hamilton & Ives, 1982; Vogel & Wetherbe, 1984; Culnan, 1986; Culnan, 1987; Jackson & Nath, 1989; Gillenson & Stutz, 1991; Nord & Nord, 1995; Walstrom et al., 1995; Hardgrave & Walstrom, 1997; Im et al., 1998a, 1998b; Walstrom & Leonard, 2000; Vessey et al., 2002; Galliers & Meadows, 2003; Chen & Hirschheim, 2004).

Thus, far less is known about European IS research. Are there particular characteristics that differentiate European IS research from that done elsewhere? Do European researchers have different publishing and citation preferences? (see, e.g., Gallivan & Benbunan-Fich, 2007). Can European research be identified by its choice of research topics? Which institutions are most active in research? Where are most IS researchers located? How many IS researchers exist in Europe?

The aim of this paper is to begin to address these questions, and to build on the limited empirical work on the topic by developing a profile of European IS research that can form the basis for international comparisons. Earlier work in this area includes, for example, the first survey of European IS academics that took place in 1996 (Avgerou et al., 1999), which followed a somewhat similar survey of the U.K. IS community some 2 years earlier (Galliers et al., 1997). In addition, Nurminen (1997, 1999) has analysed the contributions to the IRIS conference during its formative stages (i.e., 1978–1981 and 1982–1988), Desq et al. (2002) and Peaucelle (2001) review the French language IS literature, and Iivari and Lyytinen (1999) provide an account of research on IS development in Scandinavia.

Moreover, there is an important temporal element to any such understanding of IS research. As a relatively young field, there are likely to be lag effects as new researchers join the field, as new conferences are formed and as new journals emerge with their own agendas. It is therefore important to appreciate the features of European IS research as they appear now, rather than as they were 10 years ago. Thus, the claims by Evaristo & Karahanna (1997) that there are few differences between North American and European IS research may well be skewed by the fact that they draw on data taken from between 1985 and 1990. Similar methodological concerns arise when drawing on the existing studies of North American publishing and citation preferences. For example, there is a strong issue of path dependency where later studies often base their samples on the journals and outlets presented in earlier research. Even assumptions about the most widespread and prestigious journals in the field (Nord & Nord, 1995; Claver et al., 2000; Gallivan & Benbunan-Fich, 2007) may be problematic in the European context where computer science and systems development/implementation is often the main focus rather than the mainstream business issues found in the U.S. field of MIS (see Avgerou et al. (1999) for details).

Since the first conference in 1993, ECIS has come to be the leading forum for European IS researchers to meet and present their work. As such, papers presented at ECIS offer a good proxy for understanding the state of European IS research. The paper is structured as follows. Following this introductory section, the paper presents the research method used in the construction of the database and the subsequent analysis of these data. This is followed by the presentation of our key findings thus far, helping to place European IS research in a global context, and identifying further research that might usefully be carried out. More detailed data are provided in the Appendices.

Research method

In developing this profile of European IS research, this paper reports on all the publications included in the proceedings of the first 10 years of ECIS conferences. In addition to the copies of the proceedings themselves, two main databases were used. The first was an Endnote library containing full bibliographic details of all ECIS papers. This was created using the Endnote libraries of ECIS proceedings made available by the ECIS standing committee (ECIS Endnote, 2007). This Endnote library was used to provide data for the second database, which recorded all the citation and institution data used in the analysis. The Endnote library was also used to identify the most frequent authors and to classify the research areas presented at ECIS. The second database was developed using Access and stored details of all ECIS papers, all the institutions (and their countries) associated with the papers. It also included a list of papers cited in the ECIS papers. Further details of the design of the database and how the database was populated are given in Appendix A. The data were analysed by running queries against the data, and the use of the relational database allowed for checking specific hypotheses and trends. Data checking measures are detailed in Appendix B.

In the next section, the basic profile of the ECIS papers is presented. This is followed by a more detailed analysis of the results and their implications for our understanding of European IS research.

Results: profile

Table C1 in Appendix C presents the locations of the first 10 ECIS conferences and their dates. There is a clear pattern for ECIS conferences being held around June, although there is some variation according to the academic calendar of the hosting institutions and other important dates (e.g., Midsummer celebrations in Scandinavia). ECIS has been hosted by institutions from 10 different countries during its first decade of existence, from as far afield as Cork in the Irish Republic in the North West, to Athens, Greece in the South East; from Gdansk, Poland in the North East, to Lisbon, Portugal in the South West. From a relatively small conference in 1993 (Henley-on-Thames, England), with just 45 papers accepted for presentation, ECIS has grown to an average of 130 papers per conference over the first 10 years of its existence (see Table C2). The largest number of papers presented (205) was at the 2000 conference, held in Vienna, Austria.

Table C1 - Location of ECIS Conferences.

Full table

Table C2 - Number of papers per conference.

Full table

ECIS's claim to be the leading conference for European IS researchers can be supported by the data presented in Table C3, which shows that – at least for Western Europe – by ECIS 1996 papers had been accepted from all major countries in the region. Interestingly, the expansion into Central and Eastern Europe, which can be seen with the first papers from Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia coincided with the hosting of ECIS in Central and Eastern Europe (Bled, Slovenia in 2001 and Gdansk, Poland in 2002).

Table C3 - First papers by country.

Full table

There are few surprises when considering the number of authors per paper (see Table C4) with one or two authors per paper being the most common, accounting for two-thirds of all papers; nor with the fact that two-thirds of all papers have authors from one institution only (although a quarter of the papers have authors from two institutions, see Table C5). Less than 10% of the papers have three to five institutions represented, suggesting that there remains a relative lack of inter-institutional IS research in Europe, despite the disappearance of national frontiers in the European Union.

Table C4 - Number of authors per paper.

Full table

Table C5 - Number of institutions per paper.

Full table

Twenty-six countries have had at least 10 papers published in ECIS over the first 10 years, with the U.K. having by far the largest proportion of papers, as can be seen from Table C6. Interestingly, the next largest contributors are Australia and the U.S.A., both of which are English speaking and are outside what might be considered to be the catchment area for ECIS. This trend can be partially explained by the fact that English is the language used at ECIS, and by considering the data in Table C7 that presents the number of papers by country over the first 10 years of ECIS. From this it can be seen that, whilst the U.K. has a consistently large number of papers at each conference, for Australia and the U.S.A. the patterns are more varied. For example, Australian participation has been far higher in the last 5 years than it was in the first 5 years, whereas American participation seems to have varied according to conference location, with a marked drop in 1999 (Copenhagen).

Table C6 - Most frequent representation by country.

Full table

Table C7 - Papers by country over time.

Full table

As Table C8 shows, there is considerable variation in the relationship between papers from a particular country and papers from particular institutions within a country. Thus, whilst Germany is fourth in the national rankings, no single German institution has more than 14 papers in ECIS, whereas Ireland, which is 12th overall, provides the third most frequent institution (University College, Cork – host of ECIS 1997). The U.K. is well represented, with the London School of Economics (LSE), the University of Warwick, the University of Salford and Brunel University, each accounting for more than 20 papers. Similarly, Denmark – in the form of Copenhagen Business School and Aalborg University – accounts for 43 of the papers presented.

Table C8 - Most frequently represented institutions.

Full table

Thirty-eight authors have published six or more papers in ECIS over the years, with none publishing a paper in every conference (see Table C9). An institutional/country analysis is problematic for these data, as many of these authors have changed institution over the period. Five of the top six authors (in terms of the number of papers presented) come from the U.K. Germany provides two of the top 10 most prolific ECIS authors, while Ireland, Denmark and Australia each provide one.

Table C9 - Most frequent authors, by year.

Full table

Results: trends

One useful way of determining the characteristics of a research community is to consider its key citations. The analysis of the papers cited by ECIS authors shows some interesting patterns that strongly suggest that European researchers have a different research profile to those reported elsewhere (Culnan, 1986, 1987; Gillenson & Stutz, 1991; Nord & Nord, 1995; Claver et al., 2000; Walstrom & Leonard, 2000). See also Whitley & Galliers (2007). Details of the means by which data were checked are given in the section Top cited items in Appendix B. Table 1 presents the most cited items.

Table 1 - Most cited sources.

Full table

Given the business-oriented focus of much IS research, it is perhaps unsurprising that over half of the items cited are focussed on business/strategy issues. More unusually, and perhaps more significantly, the large number of citations to texts on research approaches (e.g., Yin on case studies; Walsham on interpretivist approaches) would indicate a high profile for such research methods and topics in Europe. Other significant features include the large number of citations of leading European Systems/IS researchers such as Checkland, Walsham and Earl. These individuals have been particularly influential on European IS research. Another distinctive feature is the citation of the social theorist Anthony Giddens, and his work on the constitution of society (Giddens, 1984). His book, bearing the same title, introduces structuration theory. Similarly, Zuboff's In the Age of the Smart Machine (Zuboff, 1988), which provides detailed ethnographic descriptions of 'informated' work practices, also appears in the list. It is also interesting to note the high proportion (74%) of books in this list.

When considering traditional sources for citations (i.e., leading journals and conferences), a further interesting pattern emerges, as can be seen from Table C10. Leading North American journals (MIS Quarterly, Harvard Business Review (HBR) and Organisation Science) account for over 40% of citations, while leading European journals (Journal of Strategic IS, European Journal of IS, IS Journal and Journal of IT) account for just 21% of citations – prior U.S. influence on European IS research is therefore considerable. Having said that, ECIS itself accounts for 11% of citations (ICIS accounts for just 5%), so papers cited in ECIS proceedings together with the above mentioned European journals combined account for practically one-third of the ECIS citations from common sources (cf. Gallivan & Benbunan-Fich, 2007).

Table C10 - Most cited common sources.

Full table

In terms of specific articles from these sources (Table 2), once again the focus on methodology (e.g., (Benbasat et al., 1987; Lee, 1989; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991) and business issues (e.g., Porter & Millar, 1985; Cash & Konsynski, 1985; Johnston & Vitale, 1988; Hammer, 1990; DeLone & McLean, 1995; Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995) is noteworthy.

Table 2 - Most frequently cited articles from common sources.

Full table

The research also looked at the research themes presented at ECIS over the period of study. In order to analyse the papers, the classification proposed by Banker & Kauffman (2004) was used. They analysed each paper, initially in terms of its title but also by examining the abstract and contents, to locate it within the classification. Most papers were easily placed in a single category but a few were located in more than one category. Banker & Kauffman (2004) propose 10 categories for IS research papers that appeared in Management Science. These are: decision support and design science, value of information, human–computer systems design, IS organisation and strategy, economics of IS and IT, global and societal issues, electronic markets, inter-organisational issues, group decision making and creativity, IS research. These categories were developed further to more closely reflect the trends for ECIS with, for example, the value of information category being merged with executive and decision support systems, and the organisation and strategy category being merged with inter-organisation issues. The final categories used in this research are presented in Table C11.

Table C11 - Categories used for classifying research topic.

Full table

Using this revised classification, we can see from Table 3 that the ECIS community tend to focus greater attention on social, organisational, strategic, economic and market aspects of IS than on the IT artefact and related development and human–computer interaction issues, in marked contrast to the claims in Benbasat & Zmud (2003), for example.

Table 3 - Papers by research topic.

Full table

Table 4 shows how the overall patterns of research topics have varied over the first 10 years of ECIS. For example, there has been a steady growth of papers exploring the electronic markets that new technologies such as the internet enable, along with growth in economics-driven analyses of IS. In contrast, research in decision support systems topics – a dominant topic in the North American IS community over the years (Walstrom & Leonard, 2000) – declines in Europe in recent years. Also of note is the large clustering of research in broadly societal areas, suggesting that there is some truth in the belief that much European IS research is focussed on non-traditional organisational contexts (including education, e-government and non-profit organisations).

Table 4 - Percentages of papers in each research topic, by year.

Full table

Another common belief about European IS research is that it draws heavily on what might be broadly classified as social theory. In order to explore this belief, the paper takes a method developed by Jones (2000) for analysing the social theory content of papers. He looks to see how many papers cite social theorists and how many different social theorists they cite (Appendix B MJI papers).

In the first 10 years of ECIS, 29% of the papers (335 papers) cite at least one social theorist, with the most popular social theory texts being given in Table 5.

Table 5 - Most popular social theory sources.

Full table

Jones (2000) defines the social citation density (the 'Matthew Jones Index' (MJI)) as the sum of the number of distinct social theorists cited by each paper, divided by the total number papers. Using this notation, the first 10 years of ECIS have a MJI of 0.53 (618 distinct authors mentioned in the papers). As a comparison, the journals MIS Quarterly and JMIS have a MJI of 0.05 for the period 1992–1999, during which period they published almost 400 papers, whereas IFIP working group 8.2 conferences have an average MJI of 2.1 between 1979 and 1999, during which period almost 300 papers were published.

Table 6 lists the number of social theory sources cited, by country, noting that papers may have authors from more than one country (the other countries represented are Canada (nine) Greece and Norway (seven), Switzerland (six), New Zealand and South Africa (five), Belgium (three), Hong Kong, Portugal, Singapore and Spain (two), Austria, Hungary, Iran, Russia, Slovenia and Taiwan (one)). The proportion of social theory papers is closely correlated to the total number of papers presented by authors from that country (0.71) with the U.K. providing proportionately more social theory papers and the U.S.A. proportionately fewer papers.

Table 6 - Number of papers citing social theory sources by country.

Full table

Given the far larger sample size for ECIS (over 1100 papers) and the breadth of topic coverage that this is likely to entail, this strongly suggests that European IS research draws far more heavily on social theory than 'mainstream' (i.e., U.S.-based) IS journals and is also strong in comparison to outlets that are more heavily focussed on social theory.

Conclusions

Table 7 lists the key characteristics of the ECIS community as presented in this paper. These are proposed as the elements of a research profile for IS research that can be used as the basis for international comparisons. For example, the ECIS profile could be compared with similar profiles developed for ICIS, PACIS and AMCIS (see, e.g., Chan et al., 2006; Xu & Chau, 2006 on ICIS). Alternatively, the profile definition can be used to characterise the differences between different journals (or groups of journals). For example, how does the international representation and key citations of EJIS compare with those presented in MIS Quarterly or IS Research?

Table 7 - Proposed profile elements for comparing IS communities.

Full table

From this presentation of results it is apparent that there are significant patterns to European IS research, as evidenced through papers presented in the first 10 European Conferences on IS, and further, that some of these patterns are distinct from those in evidence in the North American IS research tradition. The data presented here can therefore form a basis for international comparisons. There is clearly much more analysis of the data required, including patterns of citation by institution and country, and research approaches adopted, as well as on-going analysis of the papers published in ECIS proceedings in years subsequent to the first 10 years of the conference. Such analyses will be the subject of future research.

We might expect, for example, given the high preponderance of citations of the work of Yin (1989) and Walsham (1993) that interpretivist and/or case study research will continue to represent something of a tradition in European IS research. It might also be of interest for analyses to take place of the AMCIS and PACIS conference proceedings using the profile of European IS research developed here as a basis, with a view to ascertaining whether there are distinctive features of the IS research being undertaken in these regions of the world.

Trend data might also be considered in more detail. For example, will the work of the likes of Checkland and Giddens remain seminal and timeless, or will we see other authors emerge on the scene? Will references to the work of Hammer and Davenport on BPR, or Porter on competitive advantage begin to become less frequently cited as time goes on? One might expect to see such trends as these, given the decline in the percentage of papers considering particular topics, as indicated in Table 4.

Notwithstanding these outstanding questions, the current paper gives an insight into some of the characteristics of European IS research, and suggests that the claims made by Evaristo & Karahanna (1997), for example, that there are few difference between North American and European IS research may well be mistaken.

References

1. AIS (2007) Association for Information Systems. Archived at http://plone.aisnet.org/.
2. Austin JL (1962) How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
3. Avgerou C, Siemer J and Bjorn-Andersen N (1999) The academic field of information systems in Europe. European Journal of Information Systems 8(2), 136–153. | Article |
4. Banker RD and Kauffman RJ (2004) 50th anniversary article: the evolution of research on information systems: a fiftieth-year survey of the literature in management science. Management Science 50(3), 281–298. | Article |
5. Barrett S and Konsynski B (1982) Inter-organization information sharing systems. MIS Quarterly 6(5), 93–105. | Article |
6. Benbasat I, Goldstein D and Mead M (1987) The case study research strategy in studies of IS. MIS Quarterly 11(3), 369–386. | Article |
7. Benbasat I and Zmud R (2003) The identity crisis within the IS discipline: defining and communicating the discipline's core properties. MIS Quarterly 27(2), 183–194.
8. Berger P and Luckmann T (1966) The Social Construction of Reality. Penguin, London.
9. Buckingham RA, Hirschheim RA, Land FF and Tully CJ (1987) Information Systems Education: Recommendations and Implementation. British Computer Society Monographs in Informatics, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
10. Burrell B and Morgan G (1979) Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis. Heinemann, London.
11. Caminer D, Aris J, Hermon P and Land F (1998) LEO – The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer. McGraw Hill, New York.
12. Cash JI and Konsynski B (1985) IS redraws competitive boundaries. Harvard Business Review 63(2), 134–142.
13. Chan HC, Kim H-W and Tan WC (2006) Information systems citation patterns from international conference on information systems articles. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 57(9), 1263–1274. | Article |
14. Checkland PB (1981) Systems Thinking, Systems Practice. Wiley, Chichester.
15. Chen W and Hirschheim R (2004) A paradigmatic and methodological examination of information systems research from 1991 to 2001. Information Systems Journal 14(3), 197–235. | Article |
16. Claver E, Gonzalez R and Llopis J (2000) An analysis of research in information systems (1981–1997). Information & Management 37(5), 181–195. | Article |
17. Coase RH (1937) The nature of the firm. Economica 4(16), 386–405. | Article |
18. Copeland DG and McKenney JL (1988) Airlines reservations systems: lessons from history. MIS Quarterly 12(3), 353–370. | Article |
19. Culnan M (1986) The intellectual development of management information systems, 1972–1982: a co-citation analysis. Management Science 32(2), 156–172.
20. Culnan M (1987) Mapping the intellectual structure of MIS, 1980–1985: a co-citation analysis. MIS Quarterly 11(3), 341–353. | Article |
21. Davenport TH (1993) Process Innovation: Reengineering Work through Information Technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.
22. Davenport TH and Short JE (1990) The new industrial engineering:information technology and business process redesign. Sloan Management Review 31(4), 11–27.
23. Davidow W and Malone M (1992) The Virtual Corporation. Harper Collins, New York.
24. Davis FD (1989) Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly 13(3), 319–340. | Article |
25. Davis GB (1980) A systematic evaluation of publications for promotion of MIS academics. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems, pp 206–216, Philadelphia, PA.
26. DeLone WH and McLean ER (1995) Information systems success: the quest for the dependent variable. Information Systems Research 3(1), 60–95.
27. Earl MJ (1989) Management Strategies for Information Technology. Prentice Hall, London.
28. Earl MJ (1993) Experiences in strategic information systems planning. MIS Quarterly 17(1), 1–24. | Article |
29. Eason KD (1988) Information Technology and Organisational Change. Taylor & Francis, London.
30. ECIS (2007) ECIS standing committee. Archived at http://personal.lse.ac.uk/whitley/ecis/.
31. ECIS Endnote (2007) Endnote libraries for ECIS conferences. Archived at http://is2.lse.ac.uk/asp/aspecis/Default.htm.
32. Eisenhardt KM (1989) Building theories from case study research. Academy of Management Review 14(4), 532–550. | Article |
33. Evaristo JR and Karahanna E (1997) Is North American IS research different from European IS research? The Database for Advances in Information Systems 28(3), 32–42.
34. Farbey B, Land F F and Targett D (1992) Evaluating investments in IT. Journal of Information Technology 7(2), 109–122.
35. Ferry G (2003) A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer. Fourth Estate, London.
36. Galliers RD (1990) Choosing appropriate information systems research approaches: a revised taxonomy. In Information Systems Research: Contemporary Approaches and Emergent Traditions (NISSEN H-E, KLEIN HK and HIRSCHHEIM R, Eds), pp 327–346, North-Holland, Copenhagen, Denmark.
37. Galliers RD (1991) Strategic information systems planning: myths, reality and guidelines for successful implementation. European Journal of Information Systems 1(1), 55–64.
38. Galliers RD (1993) Research issues in information systems. Journal of Information Technology 8(2), 92–98.
39. Galliers RD and Leidner DE (2003) Strategic Information Management: Challenges and Strategies in Managing Information Systems. 3rd edition, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford.
40. Galliers RD and Meadows M (2003) A discipline divided: globalization and parochialism in information systems research. Communications of the AIS 11 (Article 5).
41. Galliers RD, Mylonopoulos NA, Morris C and Meadows M (1997) IS research agendas and practices in the U.K. In Key Issues in Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2nd UKAIS Conference (AVISON D, Ed), pp 143–171, McGraw-Hill, Southampton, 2–4 April, 1997.
42. Galliers RD and Sutherland AR (1991) Information systems management and strategy formulation: the 'stages of growth' model revisited. Journal of Information Systems (now Information Systems Journal) 1(2), 89–114.
43. Galliers RD and Whitley EA (2002) An Anatomy of European Information Systems Research ECIS 1993–ECIS 2002: some initial findings. In 10th European Conference on Information Systems (WRYCZA S, Ed), pp. 3–18, Gdansk, Poland.
44. Gallivan M and Benbunan-Fich R (2007) Analysing IS research productivity: an inclusive approach to global IS scholarship. European Journal of Information Systems 16(1), 36–53. | Article |
45. Giddens A (1984) The Constitution of Society. Polity press, Cambridge.
46. Gillenson ML and Stutz JD (1991) Academic issues in MIS journals and books. MIS Quarterly 15(4), 447–452. | Article |
47. Glaser BG and Strauss AL (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory. Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine Publishing Company, New York.
48. Glass RL (2005) The first business application: a significant milestone in software history. Communications of the ACM 48(3), 25–26. | Article |
49. Habermas J (1986) The Theory of Communicative Action (Volume One): Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Polity Press, Cambridge.
50. Hamilton S, and Ives B (1980) Communications of MIS research: an analysis of journal stratification. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems, pp 220–232.
51. Hamilton S and Ives B (1982) Knowledge utilization among MIS researchers. MIS Quarterly 6(4), 61–74. | Article |
52. Hammer M (1990) Re-engineering work: don't automate obliterate. Harvard Business Review 68(4), 104–112.
53. Hammer M and Champy J (1993) Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business, New York.
54. Hardgrave BC and Walstrom KA (1997) Forums for MIS scholars. Communications of the ACM 40(11), 119–124. | Article |
55. Iivari J and Lyytinen K (1999) Research on Information Systems development in Scandinavia: unity in plurity. In Rethinking Management Information Systems: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (CURRIE WL and GALLIERS RD, Eds), pp 57–102, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
56. Im KS, Kim KY and Kim JS (1998a) An assessment of individual and institutional research productivity in MIS. Decision Line 29(1), 8–12.
57. Im KS, Kim KY and Kim JS (1998b) A response to assessing research productivity: important but neglected considerations. Decision Line 29(1), 12–15.
58. Jackson WM and Nath R (1989) Publication patterns of MIS researchers. Interfaces 11(2), 15–20.
59. Jarvenpaa S and Ives B (1991) Executive involvement and participation in the management of information technology. MIS Quarterly 15(2), 205–227. | Article |
60. Johnston HR and Vitale MR (1988) Creating competitive advantages with inter-organizational information systems. MIS Quarterly 12(4), 153–165. | Article |
61. Jones M (2000) The Moving finger: the use of social theory in WG 8.2 conference papers, 1975–1999. In Organizational and Social Perspectives on Information Technology (BASKERVILLE R, STAGE J and DEGROSS JI, Eds), pp 15–32, Kluwer, Aalborg, Denmark.
62. Journal Endnote (2007) Endnote libraries for leading IS journals and conferences. Archived at http://is2.lse.ac.uk/support/endnote/.
63. Latour B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
64. Lee AS (1989) A scientific methodology for MIS case studies. MIS Quarterly 13(1), 32–50.
65. Malone TW, Yates J and Benjamin R (1987) Electronic markets and electronic hierarchies. Communications of the ACM 30(6), 484–497. | Article |
66. McFarlan FW (1984) Information technology changes the way you compete. Harvard Business Review 62(3), 64–71.
67. Mylonopoulos NA and Theoharakis V (2001) Perceptions of information systems journals: a worldwide view. Communications of the ACM 44(9), 29–33. | Article |
68. Newman M and Robey D (1992) A social process model of user-analyst relationships. MIS Quarterly 16(2), 249–266. | Article |
69. Niederman F, Brancheau JC and Wetherbe JC (1991) Information systems management issues for the 1990s. MIS Quarterly 15(4), 475–495. | Article |
70. Nolan RW (1979) Managing the crises in data processing. Harvard Business Review 57(2), 115–126.
71. Nonaka I (1994) A dynamic theory of organizational knowledge creation. Organization Science 5(1), 14–37.
72. Nonaka I and Takeuchi H (1995) The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
73. Nord JH and Nord GD (1995) MIS research: journal status assessment and analysis. Information & Management 29(1), 29–42. | Article |
74. Nunamaker JF (1980) Publications and the use of the science citation index. In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems, pp 217–219, Philadelphia, PA.
75. Nurminen M (1997) Nurminen's column on IRIS, Part 1. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 9(2), 47–52.
76. Nurminen M (1999) Nurminen's column on IRIS, Part 2. Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems 11(2), 5–12.
77. Orlikowski WJ (1992a) The duality of technology: rethinking the concept of technology in organizations. Organization Science 3(3), 398–427.
78. Orlikowski WJ (1993a) CASE tools as organizational change: Investigating incremental and radical changes in systems development. MIS Quarterly 17(3), 309–340. | Article |
79. Orlikowski WJ (1993b) Learning from notes: organizational issues in groupware implementation. The Information Society 9(3), 237–250.
80. Orlikowski WJ and Baroudi JJ (1991) Studying information technology in organizations: research approaches and assumptions. Information Systems Research 2(1), 1–28.
81. Polanyi M (1966) The Tacit Dimension. Peter Smith, Gloucester, MA.
82. Polanyi M (1973) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London.
83. Porter ME (1980) Competitive Strategy. The Free Press, New York.
84. Porter ME and Millar VE (1985) How information gives you competitive advantage. Harvard Business Review 66(4), 149–160.
85. Rockart JF (1979) Chief executives define their own data needs. Harvard Business Review 57(2), 81–91. | PubMed | ChemPort |
86. Rogers EM (1995) Diffusion of Innovations. Free Press, New York.
87. Scott-Morton M (Ed.) (1991) The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
88. Searle JR (1969) Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
89. Senge PM (1990) The Fifth Discipline: The Age of Practice of the Learning Organization. Century Business, London.
90. Somogyi EK and Galliers RD (1987) Applied information technology: from data processing to strategic information systems. Journal of Information Technology 2(1), 30–41.
91. Strauss AL and Corbin J (1990) Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded Theory Procedures and Techniques. Sage, Newbury Park, CA.
92. Swatman PMC and Swatman PA (1992) EDI system integration: a definition and literature survey. The Information Society 8(2), 169–205.
93. Swatman PMC, Swatman PA and Fowler DC (1994) A model of EDI integration and strategic business reengineering. Journal of Strategic Information Systems 3(1), 141–160.
94. Venkatraman N (1994) IT-induced business transformation: from automation to business scope redefinition. Sloan Management Review 35(2), 73–87.
95. Vessey I, Ramesh V and Glass RL (2002) Research in information systems: an empirical study of diversity in the discipline and its journals. Journal of Management Information Systems 19(2), 129–174.
96. Vogel DR and Wetherbe JC (1984) MIS research: a profile of leading journals and universities. Data Base 15(4), 3–14.
97. Walsham G (1993) Interpreting Information Systems in Organisations. Wiley, Chichester.
98. Walstrom KA, Hardgrave BC and Wilson RI (1995) Forums for management information systems scholars. Communications of the ACM 38(3), 93–107. | Article |
99. Walstrom KA and Leonard L (2000) Citation classics from the information systems literature. Information & Management 38(2), 59–72. | Article |
100. Whitley EA and Galliers RD (2007) An alternative perspective on citation classics: evidence from the first ten years of the European Conference on Information Systems. Information & Management Forthcoming.
101. Willcocks L (1992) Evaluating information technology investment: research findings and reappraisal. Journal of Information Systems (now Information Systems Journal) 2(4), 243–268.
102. Williamson OE (1975) Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Anti-trust Implications. Free Press, New York.
103. Williamson OE (1985) The Economic Institutions of Capitalism: Firms, Markets, Relational Contracting. Free Press, New York.
104. Xu J and Chau M (2006) The social identity of IS: analyzing the collaboration network of the ICIS conferences (1980–2005). In Proceedings of the Twenty Seventh International Conference on Information Systems (STRAUB D and KLEIN S, Eds), Milwaukee.
105. Yin RK (1989) Case Study Research: Design and Methods. Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA.
106. Zuboff S (1988) In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power. Basic Books, New York.

Appendices

Appendix A

Database design and data entry

Figure A1 gives an overview of the database structure.

Figure A1.

Database model.

Full figure and legend (18K)

The ECIS Papers table was populated using data from the Endnote library described above. To reduce data entry, the Cited Papers table was also initially populated with data from other Endnote libraries including tables of contents from leading IS journals and conferences (Journal Endnote, 2007). These cited papers were marked to indicate the Common Source that they came from (e.g., ECIS, EJIS, MISQ, etc.).

Data entry into the system was done through a web-based (ASP) interface by a team of Ph.D. and former M.Sc. students and consisted of linking ECIS Papers with Cited Papers. If an ECIS paper cited a paper (or anything else) that was not already listed in the Cited Papers table, then it was necessary to add the paper to the system. To minimise this data entry, only the first author, year and (abbreviated) title was entered. If the paper came from a Common Source this was also indicated in the database. A similar process was implemented for linking ECIS Papers with Institution and again, any new institutions were added to the system when they first arose.

For later years, the process was automated by taking the citation information directly from the pdf files of the proceedings. These were then matched against existing citations in the database – if the citation existed previously then the current paper was linked to the older version, if not the new cited paper and link were added to the database.

Although it should not be necessary to reenter Cited Papers or Institutions into the system, on occasion there was duplication of entries. Any duplicated entries were identified and replaced with a single, unique value. This was particularly the case with the citations taken directly from the pdf files. To address these cases, a 'link field' was created to link the various forms of the citations so that they all referred to the same thing. All queries were then based on the count of these link fields.

Institutions were also linked to Country, which was taken as a proxy for nationality of the author (thus a Greek academic based in a Swedish institution when submitting a paper for ECIS would be listed as Swedish for that year for analysis purposes). For each paper, only one instance of an institution would be listed against that paper (thus a paper with three authors from Institution A and two from Institution B would be listed as being linked once to both Institution A and Institution B rather than having three links to Institution A and two to Institution B).

Appendix B

Data checking measures

Top cited items

In order to ensure that the top cited items were accurate, the database was carefully checked to ensure that different versions of the same paper were properly linked to refer to the same thing. So, for example, the Yin book on case studies has existed in various versions and editions. All these were linked together so that the total score for the Yin book is for all editions of the book. Similarly, care was taken when the same item appeared to be listed in two different years or with slightly different spellings. To ensure that nothing was missed, the top cited paper lists were checked to items that had five or more citations. A second query, excluding any papers cited by U.K. authors was done, to make sure lower scoring papers were not lost. Further checking was done to make sure that all the papers in Walstrom & Leonard's (2000) list of citation classics were properly linked, as were the authors in Jones' (2000) list of social theorists.

As the U.K. contributes almost a quarter of papers, the query for the top cited items was run again without any paper with any author from the U.K. The results are given in Table B1. As can be seen, the items in this list match those in the main list (although the rankings are slightly different)

Table B1 - Top cited papers not including papers with authors from the UK.

Full table

Top common sources

For most of the papers, tracking the common source was unproblematic as the database had been preloaded with marked records of all the papers published in these sources. However, the initial design of the database had not appreciated the importance of HBR as a source of materials, and this 'common source' had to be added later. Many HBR articles were included in the pdf files added as described above and so, these were easily marked as coming from the HBR common source. Again, care was taken to check the top listed papers to see if they came from the HBR as a common source.

Top papers from common sources

These data were unproblematic as the checks described above under the sections Top cited items and Top common sources in Appendix B had already been undertaken.

MJI papers

As the cited papers are listed by author, identifying the social theorists used was relatively easy, given the list of theorists provided by Jones (2000), Table 2 and Appendix A. While identifying authors for the MJI, checks were also made to ensure that links were accurate.

As LSE and Warwick dominate and are by far the largest institutions in terms of accepted papers, excluding them from the analysis of the MJI lowers it to 0.43, and excluding all papers with an author from the U.K. lowers it to 0.31.

Jones (2000) looks at two measures. The first is the total number of social theorist sources cited in the papers. The second is the citation density, which is defined as the sum of the number of unique social theorists cited in each paper, divided by the total number of papers. Thus a paper citing Latour, Giddens and Beck would contribute three to the total number of social theorist sources cited, and three to the sum of unique social theorists. A second paper, citing two different works by Latour would contribute two to the total number of social theorist sources cited and one to the sum of unique social theorists used.

Appendix C

Detailed Tables C1, C2, C3, C4, C5, C6, C7, C8, C9, C10 and C11 are given here.

Acknowledgements

We are particularly grateful to Tayo Adewole, Dimitris Anagnostopoulos, Jennifer Asante, Alexandra Galligan, JP Grillo, Ade Ibironke, Stefan Jones, Deepak Khurana, Lukeman Lawal, Artemis Nestori, Kingsley Nudo, Emma Peel, Oraib Toukan and Gizem Yagiz who between them entered over 1600 paper institution links and 28,000 paper citation links. We also specially thank Derek Hyland for his work on the research themes data. Sven Carlsson, Torkil Clemmensen, Mike Gallivan, Ray Paul, and Richard Vidgen all gave helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

About the authors

Robert D Galliers was appointed as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs of Bentley College in 2002. Bob Galliers was previously Professor of Information Systems and Research Director in the Department of Information Systems at the LSE. He retains his connection with the LSE as a Visiting Professor. Before joining LSE, he served as Lucas Professor of Business Management Systems and Dean of Warwick Business School, U.K., and earlier as Foundation Professor and Head of the School of Information Systems at Curtin University in Australia. Galliers is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and a fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS), the Association for Information Systems (FAIS) and the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). He has served as President of the AIS and as co-chair of the 2002 ICIS. He has held visiting professorships at INSEAD, France, University of St Gallen, Switzerland, the City University of Hong Kong, the Institute for Advanced Management Studies, Belgium, National University of Singapore, Hong Polytechnic University and Bond University, Australia. He is a member of the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of Tilburg University, The Netherlands, the Board of Advisors of Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University, Sweden, and the International Scientific Committee of Euromed Marseille, France.

He has published widely in many of the leading international journals on IS and has also co-authored a number of books, the most recent being: Exploring Information Systems Research Approaches (Routledge, 2007), three editions of the best seller, Strategic Information Management (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1994, 1999, 2003), Rethinking Management Information Systems (Oxford University Press, 1999) and IT and Organizational Transformation (Wiley, 1998). He holds an AB degree with honours in Economics from Harvard University, an M.A. with distinction in Management Systems from Lancaster University, and a Ph.D. in IS from the LSE. He was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science degree by Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Finland in 1995. His research focuses in the main on IS strategy and the management of change associated with the adoption and appropriation of ICT-based systems within and between organisations.

Edgar Whitley is a Reader in IS at the LSE and Political Science. He has a B.Sc. (Econ) Computing and a Ph.D. in IS, both from the LSE. He is co-editor for the journal Information Technology & People and an associate editor for the journal Management Information Systems Quarterly. He was one of the co-editors of the recent EJIS special issue of personal reflections on Claudio Ciborra's life and work (EJIS 14(5), 2005). His work explores the application of social theory to IS with recent papers exploring concepts of interpretative flexibility, ontological radicalism around the IT artefact, regulation of technologies and identity management. He was the research co-ordinator for the LSE's Identity Project see http://identityproject.lse.ac.uk/default.htm