Design science authors must make a contribution through their work. But what counts as a contribution in design science? What even is a contribution anyway? This word has a very specific meaning both in academia and in DSR.

To help understand what counts as a “contribution” in practice, Lan Sang and I reviewed 11 recent design science research papers from MIS Quarterly and ISR. We then searched for the word “contribution” in these manuscripts and broke down how these successful DSR authors described the contributions of their work.

This process revealed that authors tend to claim four broad classes of contributions: 1️⃣ practical contributions, 2️⃣ methodological contributions, 3️⃣ empirical contributions, and 4️⃣ theoretical contributions.

Contribution types

1️⃣ Practical contributions are the most straightforward. Authors offering practical contributions propose that their work has some practical benefit for a group of stakeholders or for solving some established task. For example, Liu et al. (2025) claim that their work has practical benefits like time and cost savings during medical document review.

2️⃣ Methodological contributions offer new tools or techniques. For example, Ampel et al. (2024) propose that their study “𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗶𝗯𝘂𝘁𝗲𝘀 a BiLSTM model IT artifact with a carefully combined feature-based model pretraining, expert knowledge layer transfer, and long sequential text classification to the IS knowledge base.” Methodological contributions are common in computational design research, and lend themselves to CS-style comparisons between different possible ways of approaching a task.

3️⃣ Empirical contributions are a little more subtle. In DSR, empirical contributions help you learn something new about people or institutions through the creation of an artifact. For example, Wambsganss et al. (2024) show that providing a specific kind of feedback using a specialized software artifact can improve student writing skills. Their artifact is a means to discover something about people and how they learn. The artifact helps build empirical knowledge about a topic.

4️⃣ Finally, many papers also propose theoretical contributions, a broad category which we use to include diverse contributions like frameworks for approaching a task (Kim et al., 2023), explicit connections with theoretical perspectives (Faik et al., 2024), articulation of design requirements (Liu et al., 2025), and new design theory (Danatzis et al., 2024). Theory in DSR is a big and complex topic (see my prior post on this). But for our purposes here, just note that many DSR authors claim different kinds of theoretical contributions in their work.

Having broken down 1️⃣ - 4️⃣, I think the next question is how to do a good job at each of these kinds of contributions. What makes a claimed practical contribution good or interesting? How does one do a good job on 1️⃣ through 4️⃣. These are topics for another post.

Papers reviewed:

MIS Quarterly

• Ampel et al. (2024)
• Danatzis et al. (2024)
• Faik et al. (2024)
• Kim et al. (2023)
• Li et al. (2024)
• Liu et al. (2025)
• Zhang et al. (2024)

Information Systems Research

• Bossler et al. (2025)
• Guo et al. (2025)
• Wambsganss et al. (2025)
• Xie et al. (2025)