How two unique paper styles can increase your productivity, visibility, and impact as an IS researcher

Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 2003 by Peffers, Ken

JITTA was successful in accomplishing two major objectives in 2002. Firstly, it attracted interesting, high quality papers from a number of researchers of substance. Secondly, we published all of these papers within six months of their dates of submission.

We haven't been as successful, however, in convincing researchers to produce and submit papers in two new paper styles that we invented especially JITTA. These two new styles have the potential to dramatically improve authors' productivity, visibility, and impact, while positively affecting the research productivity of the IS discipline as a whole. In this next year I hope that we can make all IS researchers aware of the potential of these new paper styles to benefit them, their research, and IS research.

In the research agenda paper researchers make the case for an agenda for a new or extended stream of research in information systems. To do this they might review literature, create new frameworks and theories, and/or argue for new research questions, propositions or hypotheses.

In this issue we have published a paper that can serve as an exemplar for this new style. In "An Agenda for Research about the Value of Payment Systems for Transactions in Electronic Commerce (Peffers and Ma, 2003)," we motivate the need for a new research stream to study the interaction between payment systems features and transaction characteristics and their effects on the viability of electronic commerce transactions. We used practitioner literature, primarily, because there is little academic literature that addresses this subject. We developed a new framework and 35 propositions for use in future empirical studies. In this case the research agenda paper opened up an agenda for research in on issues that haven't been studied much at all by IS researchers. These are issues that are very much of interest to managers in industries such as financial services, retailing, and logistics. If it inspires other researchers to participate in this research, it has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the IS literature. Other research agenda papers could focus on research that the authors are planning to or are already studying. The scope of the agenda could be more narrow or broad.

A state-of-research review (SORR) paper reviews a number of contemporary papers in a research stream to describe the current state of such research. Unlike full review papers, that might be published in traditional journals, e.g., MISQ Review, a SORR paper doesn't normally attempt to make a full historical case for a stream of research, it's likely to focus on a more narrow stream, and it would generally focus on the most contemporary papers, including working papers, workshop and conference presentations, and the like. As a result, it may much shorter and produced much more quickly. It might include a bibliography of work in the area that is not cited in the paper. It would likely draw inferences about the motivation and value of this work and possible extensions to the current work. The SORR authors are likely, but not necessarily, also authors of some of the work reviewed. The SORR might, in a very narrow review, describe papers in such detail that they are almost abridged versions of the full research papers, e.g., (Potter and Balthazard, 2002). More often contemporaneous projects would be described and analyzed to show the directions of current research in order to highlight its value and to reveal opportunities for collaboration and extension.

Either of these new paper styles has three potential benefits for authors and the research community.

1.Research agenda and the state-of-research review papers generally represent additional research output from a project. They don't detract from the full research papers that will be published in traditional IS journals one to five years later.

2.These papers provide information to the community about researchers' future output, adding to its value by allowing colleagues to anticipate it and cite it in advance of formal publication.

3.By laying claim to a future stream of research, the reviewed authors can attract new collaborators, draw new researchers into exciting new streams, and extend communities of researchers who might otherwise not know of each other.

In this issue we call for papers for a special issue of JITTA on the "state-of-research" in IS. We would like to publish papers from every corner of our discipline, with researchers staking claims to the areas of their current research. We can all benefit from knowing more about what our colleagues are doing in the IS research community around the world. I hope that we're able to attract dozens of SORR papers over the coming year. If so, we'll make space for them in JITTA and, in the process, we'll create a really valuable asset for our community.

REFERENCES

Peffers, K. and W. Ma, "An Agenda for Research about the Value of Payment Systems for Transactions in Electronic Commerce," The Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), 4:4, 2003, 1-16.