A publication power approach for identifying premier information systems journals

Stressing that some universities have adopted unrealistic requirements for tenure of information systems (IS) faculty members, a recent editorial in MIS Quarterly contends that the group of premier IS journals needs to be generally recognized as having more than just two members. This article introduces the publication power approach to identifying the premier IS journals, and it does indeed find that there are more than two. A journal's publication power is calculated from the actual publishing behaviors of full-time, tenured IS faculty members at a sizable set of leading research universities. The underlying premise is that these researchers produce excellent work, collectively spanning the IS field's subject matter, and that the greatest concentrations of their collective work appear in highest visibility, most important journals suitable for its subject matter. The new empirically based approach to identifying premier IS journals (and, more broadly, identifying journals that figure most prominently in publishing activity of tenured IS researchers) offers an attractive alternative to promulgations by individuals or cliques (possibly based on outdated tradition or vested interests), to opinion surveys (subjective, possibly ill-informed, vague about rating criteria, and/or biased in various ways), and to citation analyses (which ignore semantics of references and, in the case of ISI impact factors, have additional problems that cast considerable doubt on their meaningfulness within the IS field and its subdisciplines). Results of the publication power approach can be applied and supplemented according to needs of a particular university in setting its evaluation standards for IS tenure, promotion, and merit decisions.