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1 Introduction
As the academic field of information systems (IS) has developed, IS researchers have become increasingly interested in nature of the discipline, its publication outlets, and its accomplishments. Some have suggested that such self-reflection is beneficial; by understanding our past accomplishments, the community can better direct its future efforts in the most productive manner ([2] Alavi and Carlson, 1992).
With respect to the investigating the nature of our publication outlets, one stream of research has focused on the how IS journals can be ranked. Another stream of research has looked at paradigmatic and methodological trends within the IS field. This paper builds on this second stream of work by providing a paradigmatic and methodological analysis of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) "basket" of top journals in IS.
AIS, the premier association for all IS academics, adopted a "basket" of six journals in 2007 as representing the best research publications in IS. This decision by the AIS President and Council was based on a recommendation from the IS Senior Scholars Forum. The Senior Scholars Forum is composed of senior IS academics including former editors-in-chief of MIS Quarterly (MISQ ) and Information Systems Research (ISR ), the current and former presidents of AIS, and former conference and program chairs of the International Conference of Information Systems. The AIS basket thus represents the top six IS journals as viewed by the AIS and the most senior scholars in the IS field.
The six journals in the AIS list are as follows: European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS ), Information Systems Journal (ISJ ), ISR , Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS ), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS ), and MISQ . One interesting feature of this list is that it includes two European IS journals (ISJ and EJIS ) as well as the four journals based in the USA. The AIS basket of journals thus recognizes to some extent the topical, methodological, and geographical diversity of the IS field.
Using bibliographic analysis, we classified all the research articles that have been published in the AIS basket of journals over a ten-year period, from 1998 to 2007. Using the classification framework and criteria of [4] Chen and...