The most "distinctive" IS topics by decade

IS research follows technology. This could be framed as a good thing (“relevance”) or a bad thing (“trends”). But the IS literature is marked by shifts in focus through time.

This took me a while to understand. When I started reading IS papers, I assumed the field was still focused on the same topics I found in early editions of MISQ. But as I read more, I definitely started to notice time-bound patterns.

To highlight this aspect of the IS literature, I extracted all noun phrases from all paper titles from the basket of eight using Semantic Scholar. Then I ranked phrases based on their unique association with a given decade (see technical spec below) and made the attached ridgeline plot.

This revealed that “executive information systems” were a big topic in the 1990s and that “virtual worlds” were a big topic in the 2010s. By my metric, “generative AI” is a big topic in the 2020s (as you may have noticed 😉), which partially validates the technique.

Note that this plot was specifically created to highlight temporal patterns. Other IS topics (not plotted) endure. If we use the same measure of association between phrase and decade, the ten most-enduring IS topics are: “business value”, “public sector”, “software development”, “organizational learning,” “firm performance,” “technology adoption,” “information quality,” “relationship management,” “IT professionals,” and “technology use.”