Talk:Management Information Systems Quarterly

Prestige

Prestige by author affiliations sounds like it's inverting the more common journal ratings system. The standard idea is surely that things like citation rates and possibly other bootstrap procedures are used to judge on the quality of scientific journals, and in turn, people can respect institutions based on how much those institutions' scientists publish in the highly rated journals. This at least has some merit in that to some degree it allows individual scientists to cite other articles based on their scientific content with little regard for the institutions at which the authors got jobs. Whether or not someone gets a job at a prestigious institution then depends on the citation index without creating too strong a feedback loop. If journal ratings depend directly on the authors' affiliations, and in turn, authors' publications in highly rated journals decide on which institutions they get jobs, we would have a much tighter positive feedback loop encouraged entrenched power rather than an open scientific community. That doesn't mean that we can't cite the author affiliation analysis, which unfortunately is not available without registering, but it's just one POV, what it claims is not a fact as such.

As well, the Thomson Reuters Science Citation Index is in itself now under the control of what is mainly a huge financial corporation, which in itself is problematic. However, this is also just my POV value judgment. The fact is that SCI is still widely used and in Poland, where i happen to live, it's the basis of the official Ministry list of rated scientific publications, which in turn affects hiring and firing policies and promotions of scientists in Poland. Boud (talk) 20:39, 21 August 2008 (UTC)

Journal Rankings do become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If a journal is ranked highly, more people seek to publish there, leading to higher rankings. There's all sorts of variation here, though. As one of my colleagues is fond of saying of journal rankings and other quantitative measures of academic publishing - "we don't count, we read."

Incidentally, I'm not sure the claim that MISQ is not in the ISI is correct. It has an extremely high impact factor. Should we change?

Theres a comprehensive list of IS journal ranking studies (of which there are too many, if you ask me) at http://ais.affiniscape.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=432.

geraldckane (talk) 14:25, 22 August 2008 (UTC)

There are two separate issues here, which should be easy for us to sort out. They might be answered from the same source, or maybe not. Some confusion may come from the difference between the ISI as an institute and the SCI as a specific list. i'm not an expert in academic bibliometry, so i certainly may be mistaken! Let's see if we can resolve this...

1. If a reliable source claims that MISQ has a high impact factor, as you say here, then that can and probably should be cited properly in the MISQ article here.
   1. i just saw that MISQ itself claims this: http://www.misq.org/, so IMHO that's valid to cite.
   2. The ais.affiniscape.com link you gave gives a whole bunch of articles of which 8 out of 9 rank MISQ first, and the 9th ranks MISQ as second, so IMHO that's also valid to cite.
2. If MISQ is catalogued by the Thomson Reuters Corporation Science Citation Index, then that should be easy to verify. i tried the following steps:
   1. here is the wikipedia entry about the SCI: Science Citation Index
   2. this links to http://scientific.thomson.com/free/#mjl which seems quite credible
   3. http://scientific.thomsonreuters.com/mjl/ "MASTER JOURNAL LIST / Trying to learn whether a journal is covered in the Scientific databases? The master journal list includes all journal titles covered in Scientific products."
   4. Search our Master Journal List - Search Terms: information, Search Type: Title Word, Go
   5. Thomson Reuters Master Journal List SEARCH RESULTS Search Terms: INFORMATION Total journals found: 96
   6. the 67th entry is: JOURNAL OF MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Quarterly, ISSN: 0742-1222, M E SHARPE INC, 80 BUSINESS PARK DR, ARMONK, USA, NY, 10504
   7. entrys 77 and 78 are MALAYSIAN JOURNAL OF LIBRARY & INFORMATION SCIENCE and METHODS OF INFORMATION IN MEDICINE - this is where MISQ should be found alphabetically, but it's not there.

So this search 14:16, 24 August 2008 (UTC) is consistent with my search from a few days ago: there is no sign of MISQ in the SCI Master Journal List, which SCI claims includes all its "Scientific" journals. The quarterly JMIS published by M E Sharpe in NY state is in the SCI list, but that's presumably unrelated. Maybe if you explain the steps of your search in "at least two of these categories" in some detail, then we might be able to converge on this. Boud (talk) 14:16, 24 August 2008 (UTC)

The problem is that Thompson lists MISQ as "MIS Quarterly." Thus, the word "information" doesn't appear in the title and would not be picked up on your search method above. If you search MIS Quarterly and select "Full Journal Title" search type, then it comes up as the only result (but, interestingly, not if you use a title word search for the same term). The link listed by Thomson-ISI goes to the MISQ website. I can probably get a copy of the journal rankings (since I have access through my university), but is that an acceptable source for WP since it is not publicly accessible? geraldckane (talk) 13:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

You're perfectly right that Thompson lists MISQ as "MIS Quarterly", apart from the unnecessary "p" which you added to "Thomson". i used "MIS" in the title word search and got it instantly. (BTW, my guess is that "title word" search on that index probably means literally just one word. It's not a wrapper for google, in other words. :). Since you publish in that journal, i would suggest that you might want to suggest to the editors that they ask Thomson-Reuters to include the full title, not just the abbreviation. Boud (talk) 17:50, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

ok, i've modified the intro a bit based on what we have now. MISQ is present in the Polish ministry's list of journals - again alphabetically under "MIS Quarterly". Since this list is based on the Thomson-Reuters (ex-ISI) list, it's unsurprising that it's present and listed with the same acronym rather than in full. It even has 30 points, like Nature and Science, whereas "normal" international scientific journals, useful for academic careers etc., have 24 points. Boud (talk) 22:43, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

IS vs MIS; IS only or also IT researchers?

The article information systems is rather confused at the moment, so in the first paragraph i shifted the link to management information system (MIS).

Also, i put the opinions about MISQ to be those of IS researchers, since the MIS article seems to me to quite clearly distinguish IT as more directly related to software and IS as being more about the people+computers+organisation as a system. Do software people ("IT" people) really pay as much attention to MISQ as IS researchers? i don't know the answer, which is why i'm asking. Boud (talk) 22:53, 31 August 2008 (UTC)

You are correct about the distinction between IS and IT. Honestly, I am not sure whether software people think as highly of MISQ. From the CS faculty I know, they tend to be evaluated more on conference-level publications rather than journals. The reason may be that the long lead time would make any interesting findings obsolete by the time they reach print. This is merely conjecture, however, not anything authoritative.

Actually, my forthcoming article in MISQ calls for the IS academic community to establish a Wikipedia Project/Portal to help organize and contribute to IS-related infomration (like the matters we are discussing here). I think its a real crime that people who purport to study IT and organizations aren't paying more attention to what is happening on Wikipedia. I'll drop a line to the MISQ EIC and ask him to take a look at the article and our discussion. geraldckane (talk) 14:31, 2 September 2008 (UTC)

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