Re: IS Journal Categorisation

[Ken Peffers <k@peffers.com>]

John,

I would suggest that you revisit the implicit premise of your inquiry: 
that journals can be adequately characterized by content topic. 
Perhaps this isn't very much true. 

Quite a few journal editors would probably say that their journals 
are not limited to any particular topical content within IS. In 
reality most journals do have favored topics, but more importantly 
the journals differentiate themselves explicitly and implicitly 
along a large number of other dimensions, such as

Length of paper
Target audience
Review and publication process--and the time to publication
Delivery mode
Preferred research methods
Article types preferred
Style
Research interests of the editorial group

All of these dimensions influence the appropriate selection of a 
journal as output for one's research. For example, JITTA positions 
itself as the appropriate outlet for first output from interesting 
research projects. It has a very fast review process. Its delivery 
mode is electronic and soon print. Its research content is general. 
It prefers specific article types specified in the call for papers 
at http://jitta.org. These are the explicit parameters. 

Others may notice that implicit preference emerge with time and 
draw their own inferences. About other journals, for example, one 
might infer that Management Science is mostly interested in articles 
that use mathematical models, but that MISQ would prefer not to see 
them. One might conclude that MISQ isn't interested in any paper that 
shows the reader how to do anything. These kind of inferences would 
be subject to question; not all would agree with them. 

Creating typology of IS research outlets would be a complex and controversial task. 

Regards,

Ken



JITTA

A new kind of IS research journal
http://www.jitta.org/

Ken Peffers, ISMT Department 
HK University of Science and Technology 
Clear Water Bay, Kowloon 
Hong Kong 
Tel: +852 2358-7639 
Mobile: +852 9525 1041 
Email: k@peffers.com 
URL: http://www.peffers.com