A method for identifying journals in a discipline: An application to information systems Hock Chuan Chan a , Varsha Guness a , Hee-Woong Kim b, * a Department of Information Systems, National University of Singapore, 13 Computing Drive, Singapore 117417, Republic of Singapore b Graduate School of Information, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul 120-749, Republic of Korea 1. Introduction There is a perennial interest among the information systems (IS) community in identifying a set of IS journals [29]. Having a commonly agreed set of journals can serve as a guide for where to publish our research [22,23]. It can also serve to increase submissions to the journals. A commonly employed approach to identifying a set of journals is the opinion survey method, whereby IS academics are asked to rank journals based the journal’s emphasis, its value and significance to the IS field. An example is the study by Walstrom and Hardgrave [32], which asked IS faculties in the US and Canada for their perceptions of the discipline emphasis of 51 identified journals. This approach has also been applied in other studies [3,24,25,33,34]. Data collected through such surveys are primarily a reflection of the participants’ perceptions of the journals. Thus, the survey approach may be affected by the subjective views of the participants [24] and by inherent measurement biases [7]. Furthermore, individual notions of the IS discipline differ, and there are no clear objective boundaries to identify which journals are purely IS, partially IS or non-IS. Another approach is adopted by the Association for Information Systems (AIS), in which the association’s senior scholar consortium agreed on a set of eight IS journals. This is also a subjective identification, based on AIS members who are deeply engaged in the publication selection process, e.g., as editors-in-chief, or conference and track chairs. The primary objective of this study is in developing an objective method to identify a set of core journals for any discipline. This method is applied to identify a set of IS journals by developing and applying an objective empirical method. The proposed method can be used to validate the set of journals identified through the subjective processes, e.g., by a survey of general IS academics or by agreement among senior IS scholars. In particular, we examine citation behavior across journals. This is an aggregation of the behaviors of individual IS academics as manifested in their research references. The use of citation analysis is noteworthy and is purported to be more objective than using respondent perceptions [28]. We assume that if an IS journal cites ‘‘substan- tially’’ from another journal, then the other journal is also an IS journal. Culnan and Swanson [8] reported that, on average, a publication in a discipline will cite more from its own discipline Information & Management xxx (2014) xxx–xxx A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 18 October 2013 Received in revised form 17 October 2014 Accepted 12 November 2014 Available online xxx Keywords: IS journals AIS basket of journals Journal citation reports Method A B S T R A C T It is a perennial interest of the information systems community to identify a set of information systems journals. The primary approaches to achieving this identification are surveys of academics, article-level citation, and senior scholar consensus. An example of the last approach is the basket of eight journals identified by senior scholars of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). A different and efficient approach is afforded by the publication of data from Journal Citation Reports (JCR). This provides aggregate citation data across individual journals. While the findings provide general empirical support for the choice of the AIS basket of eight journals, they also indicate that five additional journals qualify as core information systems journals. Each of these journals has numerous citations of journals within this set and low citations of individual journals outside this set. Furthermore, a network centrality analysis of this set of journals reveals a high correlation between in-degree centrality and the perceived importance of journals. Overall, the study demonstrates the suitability of this method for identifying core journals in a discipline. ß 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +82 2 2123 4195. E-mail addresses: chanhc@comp.nus.edu.sg (H.C. Chan), varshaguness@gmail.com (V. Guness), kimhw@yonsei.ac.kr (H.-W. Kim). G Model INFMAN-2772; No. of Pages 8 Please cite this article in press as: H.C. Chan, et al., A method for identifying journals in a discipline: An application to information systems, Inf. Manage. (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.11.003 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Information & Management jo u rn al h om ep ag e: ww w.els evier.c o m/lo c ate/im http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.im.2014.11.003 0378-7206/ß 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.