discussion

EDITOR’S COMMENTS

The MIS Quarterly as a Platform for Engagement

By: Arun Rai Editor-in-Chief, MIS Quarterly Regents’ Professor of the University System of Georgia Robinson Chair of IT-Enabled Supply Chains and Process Innovation Harkins Chair of Information Systems Robinson College of Business Georgia State University [email protected]

In my inaugural editorial, I shared MIS Quarterly’s trifecta vision which is to (1) achieve impact on scholarship and practice as the leading source of novel and accreted IS knowledge, (2) exhibit range in work published with respect to problem domains and stakeholders addressed as well as theoretical and methodological approaches used, and (3) execute effective editorial processes in a timely manner (Rai 2016a).

To achieve this vision, we are pursuing a platform strategy with a focus on engagement with different MISQ stakeholders—those involved in editorial processes, potential authors and reviewers, and scholars and practitioners for whom MISQ articles create value.

To start with, the core of the MISQ platform is its editorial process, which focuses on developing and selecting the very best research for publication. Through editorials, editorial board meetings, and discussions among senior and associate editors, we continue to share experiences and best practices and cultivate shared understanding on how best to spot and develop work that is likely to be influential. We have been promoting SE–AE engagement in prescreening and reviewer selection and in the judicious use of reviewer resources at each stage in the review process. We have developed mechanisms to provide editors with feedback on their performance—for example, senior and associate editors now receive reports on their cycle times based on how the paper was processed (e.g., prescreening by SE only, SE–AE prescreening, full round of review) and the stage of manuscripts in the review process (e.g., initial submission, first revision, etc.). And, the editorial appointment process is based on a consideration of area of need, expertise, performance in editorial and reviewing roles, and detailed conversations between the EIC and each potential appointee to assess fit with and commitment to achieving the vision of the journal.

We are also undertaking a series of initiatives that are complementary to the editorial process. These initiatives relate to (1) the development of the quality of the inputs to the editorial process through author and reviewer development workshops, (2) enhancing the scholarly value of published work through a team with complementary expertise curating MISQ articles on a topic, (3) enhancing the practical utility of MISQ articles through non-exclusive partnerships with complementary publication and media outlets that effectively reach practitioner audiences, and (4) engagement with the IS community and other communities through social media and EIC ambassadorial activities. I use this editorial to share our progress on these initiatives.

Author Development Workshops

MISQ is offering workshops to provide authors with (1) feedback from MISQ senior editors and associate editors on potential submissions to MISQ and (2) the opportunity to discuss with editors and other authors how to develop papers for submission and resubmission to MISQ.

The workshops include

• Roundtable discussion led by editors on authors’ submissions to the workshop • Editors’ panel discussion on developing papers for initial submission to MISQ • Editors’ panel discussion on revising papers for MISQ

We have offered Pre-AMCIS MISQ Author Development Workshops in 2016 and 2017. These workshops have proven to be a great avenue for authors, particularly junior colleagues, to learn about effectively formulating and developing their work for MISQ. Receiving feedback from editors and other authors on an initial draft of their paper provides authors with a perspective on how their work can be improved and a forum to discuss issues related to the development of their research. Authors learn about Type III errors that can occur during the formulation

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Editor’s Comments

of the research problem that compromise the scholarly contributions of the work and about approaches that can be used to avoid these errors (Rai 2017). They also learn how to refine their work prior to submission and revise their work based on feedback that they receive on their submissions from editors and reviewers.

These workshops have not only been a source of value for authors but have also been very rewarding for participating editors. Providing feedback on the value derived from the workshop, two early stage faculty members who completed their Ph.D. at a leading university observed

We were talking after the MISQ Author Workshop, and we both agreed that it was a career-changing afternoon. Thanks so much for listening to our concerns and providing us with actionable advice on how to improve! We both left the workshop with new perspectives about our research, as well as a better sense of direction on how to achieve our goals.

Reviewer Development Workshops

MIS Quarterly expects virtuous reviewing as I described in my editorial on “Writing a Virtuous Review” (Rai 2016b). To promote the development of reviewers for MISQ and more broadly for the IS community, MISQ has launched Reviewer Development Workshops.

The objective of these workshops is to coach individuals who have reviewed, or are interested in reviewing, for MISQ on how to develop a virtuous review. The workshop is designed to provide participants in the workshop with (1) feedback from MISQ senior editors and associate editors on a review that the participants develop for the workshop and (2) the opportunity to discuss with editors and other participants on how to develop a virtuous review.

The workshops use a combination of experiential, vicarious, and discursive approaches for participants to learn about virtuous reviewing. Individuals selected for these workshops are assigned a paper to review based on their research expertise and interests and are expected to submit their review prior to the workshop. The assigned paper is an initial submission to MISQ.

In addition, the workshops include

• Roundtable discussions among reviewers and MISQ editors to provide feedback on submitted reviews and to discuss the “actual” review packet for the initial submission

• Roundtable discussions of subsequent rounds of revisions and reviews for papers that progressed beyond the first round • Editors’ panel discussion on characteristics of virtuous reviewing, structuring reviews, and reviewing revisions

The first reviewer development workshop was held after the ICIS meeting in Dublin. Providing feedback on the workshop, one of the participants commented

The access to other reviewers’ comments allowed me to learn from others. Also, the roundtable discussion allowed me to get guidance from editors in terms of the strength and weaknesses of my review. The discussion process provides me with the golden opportunity to learn as a reviewer, and author too.

The next workshop will be held after the ICIS meeting in Seoul. Those interested in participating in these workshops should apply when the workshops are announced on AISWorld.

MIS Quarterly Research Curations

In my inaugural editorial, I had shared that we will be launching an initiative to curate MISQ articles on selected topics of significant interest to the Information Systems and other disciplines.

Ashley Bush (Florida State University), Research Curations Editor, is working closely with me on the development of the curations. In terms of process, the Research Curations Editor and the EIC invite a team of researchers who collectively represent different perspectives related to a topic to develop a curation. The team, iteratively refines the curation based on feedback from the Research Curations Editor and the EIC.

The curations present a short summary of the work published in MISQ on the topic and the progression of the work over time, include an infographic, and provide the bundle of MISQ articles related to the topic.

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We have made great progress with this initiative, having completed the following curations:

• Securing Digital Assets (Curations team: Kai Lung Hui, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Anthony Vance, Brigham Young University; Dmitry Zhdanov, Georgia State University)

• Trust (Curations team: Matthias Söllner, Universities of St. Gallen and Kassel; Izak Benbasat, University of British Columbia; David Gefen, Drexel University; Jan Marco Leimeister, Universities of St. Gallen and Kassel; Paul A. Pavlou, Temple University)

• Information Privacy (Curations team: Aleš Popovič, University of Ljubljana; H. Jeff Smith, Miami University; James Y.L. Thong, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Sunil Wattal, Temple University)

As living documents, the curations will be updated periodically as new articles on the topics are published in MISQ.

We are in the process of curating MISQ articles on the following topics: IS Sourcing, IS Use, and Knowledge Management. We will announce the release of these and other curations through AISWorld as and when they are completed.

The feedback from the community indicates that the curations are serving as a go-to source for authors, reviewers, and editors and are also being used in doctoral seminars and workshops.

The curations are accessible from the MISQ web site at www.misq.org/research-curations/.

Partnerships with Complementary Channels

MISQ has a history of striving to achieve two types of impact: scholarly and broader impact on practice. In its early years, MISQ positioned itself to address dual audiences—IS academics and IS practitioners—both with very high, and often incompatible, expectations on what an article should address, emphasize, and look like. With the objective to become a widely recognized premier academic journal, MISQ was positioned in the early 1990s to meet the expectations of the academic audience (including college promotion and tenure committees) by publishing only the very best academic research. Acting on the need to promote relevant and executive-focused IS research, MISQ lent its name to MISQ Executive, a journal launched in 2001 to appeal to an executive audience (for details on the evolution of MISQ, see Rai 2016c).

We are now at a point in the digital revolution where IS is broadly transforming the functioning of business and society. MISQ places an editorial emphasis on motivating work in both scholarly and practical terms and on articulating the implications of the findings not only for theory and future research but also for practice. Although many MISQ articles have compelling practitioner implications and incorporate a short discussion on them, practitioners typically do not read these articles as they are written for an academic audience and with primacy on theory, research methods, and scholarly implications.1

To seize the opportunity to effectively reach broader relevant audiences in practice, MISQ is developing nonexclusive relationships with leading complementary publication and media outlets that have highly visible and broad footprints in the practice community.

MISQ –MIT-SMR Relationship: I am pleased to share that MIS Quarterly has developed a relationship with MIT-Sloan Management Review (MIT-SMR), where selected articles published in MISQ are developed into articles for publication in MIT-SMR. The value proposition is a win-win for MISQ and MIT-SMR, outlets with common interests in topics related to how information technology is affecting organizations, management practices, innovation, and value creation.2 MISQ will benefit by having its articles reach and impact business executives who are MIT-SMR’s primary audience,3 while MIT-SMR will benefit by having a supply channel with the premier IS scholarly journal.

1There are channels through which the practical utility of IS research published in MISQ and other outlets is reaching practitioners (e.g., faculty appropriating content in their executive teaching, consolidating the implications of their research programs into books targeted at practitioners, or developing versions of their work for practitioner journals).

2The commonality in interests stands out from looking at the editorial objectives of the journals; see http://misq.org/about/ and http://sloanreview.mit.edu/authors/.

3MIT-SMR’s print readership is 45K, with 37% in top management; its digital audience is 149K average unique monthly users (MIT-SMR 2017 Media Kit).

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In terms of process, the MISQ EIC and MIT-SMR Editor will appoint a liaison with experience in publishing in MISQ and in MIT-SMR or other leading practitioner outlets. I am pleased to share that Gerald (Jerry) Kane, a Senior Editor at MISQ, is serving as the MISQ–SMR liaison and working closely with me on this initiative. The MISQ EIC, in conjunction with the MISQ–SMR liaison, nominates from an upcoming MISQ issue a small number of articles to the MIT-SMR Editor who decides which of these articles, if any, are suitable to be developed for publication consideration in MIT-SMR. The MISQ EIC ascertains the interest of the authors to develop such an article, and the MIT-SMR Editor decides on the publishability of the article that is developed.

The first article from this collaboration appeared in MIT-SMR’s Spring 2017 issue4 and was based on the article published in MISQ’s March 2017 issue.5

Social Media

We are using multiple social media platforms—Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat—to share information and promote conversations about work published in MISQ. Authors are sharing different types of content (e.g., Podcast, slide deck with narration, short video, news media coverage) for MISQ’s social media platforms. We are also using the social media channels to share editorials and information related to MISQ activities (e.g., author and reviewer workshops, special issues, EIC’s ambassadorial activities).

We invite you to “Like” MISQ on Facebook (www.facebook.com/MISQuarterly), “Follow” us on Twitter @MISQuarterly, and “Follow” us on WeChat (ID: MISQuarterly)!

We will be expanding our social media initiatives to bridge with other scholarly and practitioner communities and to implement strategies to effectively customize content for different platforms. We will also establish a library of social media content that corresponds to the published work in the journal. In addition, we will be establishing a resource center for sharing experiences on how authors can produce social media content that is effective and in a manner that is not onerous.

Ambassadorial Activities

Through keynotes, panels, and presentations across the three AIS regions, I have shared with scholars in the IS community and in other disciplines the MISQ trifecta vision and related key themes. These include

• MISQ’s big tent approach of welcoming diverse perspectives and methods, as this diversity is essential to better understand complex IS phenomena and problems

• Shifting boundaries of IS phenomena and problems and the exciting opportunities for impactful work • How to avoid Type III errors in formulating research problems, thereby increasing the likelihood of impactful work • Need to safeguard against the streetlight effect, where easy-to-access datasets that are used to address piffling or pseudo problems motivate

a study • Synergies between big data and theory • Given the expanding variety in how informing theoretical perspectives can be combined with empirical research methods, traditional labels

(e.g., behavioral, design, economics, qualitative) for genres of research can be misleading or misused in characterizing the work • The need to be disciplinary while being interdisciplinary by placing IS in the foreground in the formulation of the research and

consequently the value created by it • Characteristics of virtuous reviewing

4http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/mastering-the-digital-innovation-challenge/

5 F. Svahn, L. Mathiassen, and R. Lindgren, “Embracing Digital Innovation in Incumbent Firms: How Volvo Cars Managed Competing Concerns,” MIS Quarterly (41:1), March 2017, pp. 239-253.

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MISQ 2016 Impact Factors

I am very pleased to share MISQ’s strong performance in the recently released ISI impact factors: 7.268 (2016) and 12.22 (5-year). MISQ fares very well in impact factor rankings across a range of journal categories including IS; computer science; management; and business, management and economics. Based on the 2016 5-Year Impact Factor, MISQ ranks

• First among AIS Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals • Second among the University of Texas at Dallas (UT-Dallas) list of 24 leading business journals • First among 85 journals in Information Science and Library Science • Second among 146 journals in the IS subcategory of Computer Science • Third among 497 journals across subcategories in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetics, Hardware and Software,

Information Systems, Interdisciplinary Applications, Software Engineering, Theory and Methods) • Third among 193 journals in Management • Third among 588 journals in the Business, Economics, and Management categories

Congratulations to the MISQ community of authors, editors, reviewers, the Publisher, and the staff at the MISQ Editorial Office on this achievement!

References

Rai, A. 2016a. “Editor’s Comment: The MISQ Trifecta—Impact, Range, Speed,” (40:1), pp. iii-x. Rai, A. 2016b. “Editor’s Comment: Writing a Virtuous Review,” (40:3), pp. iii-x. Rai, A. 2016c. “Editor’s Comment: Celebrating 40 Years of MIS Quarterly: MISQ’s History and Future Through the Lenses of its Editors-

in-Chief,” (40:4), pp. iii-xv. Rai, A. 2017. “Editor’s Comment: Avoiding Type III Errors: Formulating IS Research Problems that Matter,” (41:2), pp. iii-vii.

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