Espoused Theory; Information Systems (IS); Research; Expectations; General Editorial Statement (GES); IS Journals; Thematic Analysis; Lexicometric Analysis
JEL code
M15
Conference name
29th International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS)
In the IS field there has been an ongoing tradition to study the publication output of the community in order to evaluate the current and potential situation of IS research. In this work,
we follow a different strategy and study what IS research claims to be. We look at those so-called
'espoused theories of IS' as found in the General Editorials Statements (GES) of IS journals. Based on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for 30 leading IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. Our results show that the representation of IS
research in the GES has changed little over the last decade.
