[AISWorld] Senior Scholars Journal Basket Survey

[Cecil Eng Huang Chua]

(1) "Forum-based democracy" is flawed in that strong opinions tend to get posts.  I am trying to partially rectify that by putting up a voice for a group of people that perhaps prefer to remain silent.  That group is the people who use or intend to use the senior scholar basket as a political tool to get access to limited resources- promotions, tenure, grant money, etc.

(2) My experience with the Senior Scholar Journal Basket has been it is a useful tool for justifying that I am a good researcher to people who don't understand what I am doing.  My survival and relative success in the field is in part due to my having this tool to use.  Thank you very much senior scholars for coming up with this tool.

(3) The senior scholars are saying that they recognize some groups might be under-represented.  They're coming up and telling folks to please state why they are under-represented and to provide cogent arguments.  I like to see this in producers of tools.  I like them to always ask, "How can I make the tool better for you?"

(4) In the world of tools, the tools that win are tools that are used.  If you really want to reject the senior scholar basket, propose an alternative tool, offer it to the marketplace, and see if we pick it up.   For me, the senior scholar basket wins over several other tools I have used in the past, including various institutional target journal lists, and ranking surveys of quality journals.  I recognize some comments here have already suggested alternatives.  

(5) Here are some affordances of the senior scholar basket

- It is relatively small.  This allows us to say, "there was a screening process."
- It is anointed by people who are recognized both within the IS community, and those external to the IS community as good IS researchers.  This confers a certain degree of legitimacy over the list.
- The list correlates with other measures of journal quality.  MIS Quarterly and ISR appear repeatedly in other lists.  They appear in the senior scholar list.

(6) That being said, the senior scholar basket isn't perfect.  When I need to justify another journal, I use another tool.  For example, I justify that I&M is a good journal, because it is on the ABDC list, a list that has legitimacy in Australia and New Zealand.

(7) In conclusion, the senior scholar basket is a tool in a marketplace of tools.  All the flak it s receiving is to me like people who say, "MS Word sucks."  Fun to have the debate, but at the end, its kind of meaningless cause we all use it anyway- I, by the way, use MS Word 2003 and LaTeX.  I have not upgraded to the newer versions, because they suck- can't stand Ribbon.

I wish we'd be a little bit more like the martial arts community in this.  In that community, they debate the relative merits of aikido vs. kung fu vs, judo, etc.  But there's an underlying recognition that it isn't about the martial art.  Its about the martial artist. 

Cecil Chua