[AISWorld] Addressing the Financial Times 45 Journal List Revision

Wed Jun 8 16:59:51 EDT 2016

Dear colleagues,

Although I sympathizes with the comments from Gary, Dennis, Paul and Nava, I think we have to be realistic.

This is NOT a question of which of the other six journals (the Basket of eight minus MISQ and ISR) each of us would prefer. Of course each of us have one or two favorites, and each of us could put up a good case for any of them. However, it is very hard for me to conceive of a procedure through which we all can decide. All of us have vested interests.

If we look at it objectively, there is not much difference in citations and other measures, one might apply between the six.

Furthermore, it is clear that we are facing a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whichever we chose, and if it actually should be admitted to the FT-45 (of perhaps FT-50) list, whether anybody of us likes it or not, it will become one of the three most preferred journals for the IS community. In my prediction, it will within a year become the second most cited in our field.

I think it is unrealistic to get four. We might put up request for four, but we should only expect to get one plus the two we already have.

However, if we as a community should put up four, I would find it utterly unacceptable that all four come from the US. This is a total neglect of the diversity in our field, and if there should be a fourth, it is only fair that it would have to be one of the four 'European' journals, EJIS, JIT, ISJ or SIS. Actually there is a good case for each of them. But unfortunately, we in the AIS community, will have a very hard time to select one of them.

If we compare JAIS and JMIS, I do not think it is a difficult choice. Clearly one should have a lot of admiration for V. Zwass for setting up the journal and running it. It has served the IS community well for many years.

However, we have decided to set up an AIS Association, because we strongly believe that we need a society to help our field position itself vis-à-vis other business school field and vis-à-vis fields like computer science. AIS is now 20 years old, and I am convinced that having AIS had been and will be extremely valuable for the long term survival of our field.

Such a field or association needs a journal, and we agreed to set up Journal of AIS as a premier research journal. I will challenge everybody who says that the journal has not done what we set out to do. Accordingly, the time is ripe, and we should now get the prime journal of our society canonized as a top journal next to ISR and MISQ.

We cannot have JMIS instead of JAIS as our third prime journal. JMIS, with all its virtues, is not 'owned' by AIS. IMIS is run (admittedly very well) more or less by one person. I personally have a lot of admiration for him, but JMIS cannot be one of our 'prime-journals'. We need Journal of AIS  to be in the top three.

Accordingly, I think that we as a community should rally behind the initiative, which is signed by the democratically elected past chair, current chair and future chair of AIS. Anything else that that is likely to cause ambiguity, an ambiguity that will be used by our opponents to argue against us getting a third journal in the FT-45.

In other words, let us join forces in order that we might get JAIS a third IS journal into the FT-45 list. JAIS is a journal which is really doing well. It is a journal that in an outstanding way is representing all of AIS by being very inclusive in choice of topics, research methodologies and in composition of editorial board etc.

Best

Niels

Professor Niels Bjørn-Andersen
Department  of IT Management
Copenhagen Business School
Howitzvej 60,room 3.09
2000 Frederiksberg
Danmark
nba at cbs.dk<mailto:nba at cbs.dk>
office phone: (+45) 38 15 44 44
mobile phone: (+45) 24 79 43 07
Skype: Niels.Bjorn.Andersen
http://www.cbs.dk/en/research/departments-and-centres/department-of-it-management/staff/nbaitm

Look forward to see you at
European Conference on Information Systems – ECIS 2016
In beautiful, amazing, exciting Istanbul, 12th to 16th June 2016

-----Original Message-----
From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Nava Pliskin
Sent: 8. juni 2016 11:10
To: Paul.Lowry.PhD at gmail.com; 'Dennis, Alan R.' <ardennis at indiana.edu>; 'Templeton, Gary' <GTempleton at business.msstate.edu>; aisworld at lists.aisnet.org
Subject: Re: [AISWorld] Addressing the Financial Times 45 Journal List Revision

מתגבשת רביעייה:

MISQ, ISR, JMIS, JAIS

-----Original Message-----

From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Prof. Paul Benjamin LOWRY

Sent: Wednesday, June 08, 2016 3:59 AM

To: 'Dennis, Alan R.'; 'Templeton, Gary'; aisworld at lists.aisnet.org<mailto:aisworld at lists.aisnet.org>

Subject: Re: [AISWorld] Addressing the Financial Times 45 Journal List Revision

Friends and colleagues,

My co-authors and I have three scientometrics studies (published in MISQ and

JAIS) that support Gary's similar scientometrics evidence of MISQ, ISR, JMIS, then JAIS. But similar to Dennis' point, the results were very close at the top (except for MISQ).

To me, the bigger problem is that the FT-45 list is constructed by having deans "vote," which is a process fraught with political preference and other obvious biases. Accordingly, the FT-45 list has a good number of journals on it that are of much lower scientometric quality than JMIS and JAIS (and even the rest of the AIS-8). It even has journals that are not business journals (e.g., J. of Political Economy, J. American Statistical Association). This list also has a couple of journals that do not follow standard peer review or scientific theory/evidence (e.g., SMR, HBR). Scientometric journal quality evidence is on our side, and thus, we should use it in making our case to our deans.

Regardless, I don't think we should expend a lot of effort debating JMIS vs.

JAIS, but agree as a community to send both forward, and promote the next top IS journals where possible. There's very strong evidence for the next four journals of the AIS-8.

Thus, please approach your deans using scientific evidence, not voting based on political preference or journals your group wants to publish in. The evidence is on our side. Aside from Gary's recent article, Valacich et al.

2006 published a similar article showing that the IS field has much fewer "top" journal publishing opportunities than every other business field except accounting. Unfortunately, the FT-45 list has helped create this problem.

See more references to help with your case.

Paul

Templeton, G.F. & Lewis, B.R., 2015. "Fairness in the Institutional Valuation of Business Journals," MIS Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 523-539.

Valacich, J. S., Fuller, M. A., Schneider, C., and Dennis, A. R. 2006.

"Publication Opportunities in Premier Business Outlets: How Level Is the Playing Field?," Information Systems Research, (17:2), pp. 107-125.

Paul Benjamin Lowry, Gregory D. Moody, James Eric Gaskin, Dennis F.

Galletta, Sean Humpherys, Jordan B. Barlow, and David W. Wilson (2013).

"Evaluating journal quality and the Association for Information Systems

(AIS) Senior Scholars' journal basket via bibliometric measures: Do expert journal assessments add value?" MIS Quarterly (MISQ), vol. 37(4), 993-1012.

Also, see YouTube video narrative of this paper at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZQIDkA-ke0&feature=youtu.be.

Douglas L. Dean, Paul Benjamin Lowry, and Sean Humpherys (2011). "Profiling the research productivity of tenured information systems faculty at U.S.

institutions," MIS Quarterly (MISQ), vol. 35(1), pp. 1-15 (ISSN- 0276-7783).

Paul Benjamin Lowry, Denton Romans, and Aaron Curtis (2004). "Global journal prestige and supporting disciplines: A scientometric study of information systems journals," Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS), vol. 5(2), pp. 29-80

-----Original Message-----

From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Dennis, Alan R.

Sent: Wednesday, June 8, 2016 8:17 AM

To: 'Templeton, Gary' <GTempleton at business.msstate.edu<mailto:GTempleton at business.msstate.edu>>;

aisworld at lists.aisnet.org<mailto:aisworld at lists.aisnet.org>

Subject: Re: [AISWorld] Addressing the Financial Times 45 Journal List Revision

We just finished examining the results of the AIS Senior Scholars Journal Basket survey.  We got 975 responses. MISQ and ISR were one and two.  JAIS was three and JMIS was four, although there was no significant difference between JAIS and JMIS.

So I strongly recommend MISQ, ISR, JAIS, JMIS, and a journal of your choice.

Alan

-----Original Message-----

From: AISWorld [mailto:aisworld-bounces at lists.aisnet.org] On Behalf Of Templeton, Gary

Sent: Monday, June 6, 2016 11:27 PM

To: aisworld at lists.aisnet.org<mailto:aisworld at lists.aisnet.org>

Subject: [AISWorld] Addressing the Financial Times 45 Journal List Revision

IS faculty,

Financial Times is adjusting their list of top 45 business journals. Deans across the globe are being surveyed for journals that should be on the list.

IS faculty across the world are making suggestions to their deans about the proper contents of the list.

How many IS journals should be on the list? The current list contains 2 (MISQ and ISR) of the 45, or 4.4%. My recent publication with Bruce Lewis on business journal fairness addresses this issue. According to AACSB faculty data, 9.45% of business faculty are in the IS discipline. This translates to

4.25 (9.45% X 45) journal slots for the IS discipline.

Because FT45 is largely a public relations venue and not scientific, the IS discipline should respond accordingly. We should certainly have at least 4 on the list, but that assumes it is a scientific list. I think we should ask for 5 for fear of selling ourselves short.

Bruce and I have published two rankings (one IS and the other all business) that summarize samples of institutional lists (those used in "practice"). We found strong evidence that our field views JMIS to be the clear third most esteemed journal in our field.

At a minimum, I think the vast majority would agree that MISQ, ISR and JMIS should be in the top three. However, only submitting 3 (or 4) to our deans, may not serve our field well. I suspect there would be more argument about

#4 and #5. It would help if members of our research community could come to an agreement and pose this top 5 to our deans.

I wonder if our group could come to an agreement in such a short time, and we could make recommendations to our deans in a uniform way.

Gary

Reference:

Templeton, G.F. & Lewis, B.R., 2015. "Fairness in the Institutional Valuation of Business Journals," MIS Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 523-539.

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