[AISWorld] Communication Template for Addressing the FT45 Revision Internally (V2.0)

[Templeton, Gary]

IS colleagues,
While there will be a wide range of opinion on the exact composition, we believe it is fitting to provide a template IS faculty can use to communicate with your proper administrator regarding changes to the FT45 list of journals. The template we propose is very concise, but supported by the literature and empiricism. Given that administrators will submit their responses by June 17, it is important to communicate with them as soon as possible. The template:

"The IS faculty in the [college name] believe the Financial Times 45 (FT45) list has historically undervalued research in our field. The current list has only two IS journals, which is 4.4% of the list. A recent study by Templeton and Lewis (2015) cites an AACSB survey finding that IS faculty represented 9.45% of business faculty. Using this metric, the FT45 should contain possibly five IS journals and no less than 4 (9.45% X 45 = 4.25). Underrepresenting the IS discipline as the FT45 has done is unfair to our discipline.

In addition, a study by Lowry et al. (2013), published in the MIS Quarterly, firmly established a set of seven journals that represent the top tier with respect to both survey and bibliometric analysis. From this list, four journals satisfy all of the following: They (1) address general rather than niche research, (2) are widely respected and known as extremely rigorous, and (3) represent flagship journals of the discipline.

For this reason, we recommend that the FT45 be revised to include no less than the following IS journals:
1) MIS Quarterly
2) Information Systems Research
3) Journal of Management Information Systems
4) Journal of the Association for Information Systems

Their inclusion will make the FT45 far more representative than it has ever been and we believe the above cited study justifies the inclusion of a fifth IS journal.

For that journal, we would like to recommend the Journal of Information Technology, which has had historically strong impact factors. The current (2014) impact factor for JIT is 4.525.

Sincerely,
[names of college IS faculty]"


IS Faculty can start with the above in hopes of quickly addressing the FT45 revision being dealt with by your college. We all want our field to have a more equitable representation on the future FT45 list. We thought this would be useful given the June 17 deadline for responding to the request by Financial Times.

Good luck,

Gary Templeton
Paul Benjamin Lowry
Dennis Galletta
Alan Dennis

References:
Lowry, P.B., Moody, G., Gaskin, J., Galletta, D.F., Humpherys, Sean, Barlow, J., and Wilson, D., 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, Vol. 37, No. 4, pp. 993-1012.

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