Conference Attendance, Presentation, to Publication

Conference Attendance, Presentation, to Publication: an ICIS/AMCIS and IS Basket of Eight Analysis Research in Progress Paper Abstract

Traditionally in the IS field our doctoral education tells us to incrementally ‘grow’ a paper from having peers look at and critique, to then conference publication, and then journal publication. This study tries to link conference attendance, to conference presentation, then to journal publication. We track the attendance lists of the ICIS and AMCIS conferences, and the presenting authors at the same conferences, to the IS basket of eight authors during the same ten year period to see which authors show up in sequence between conference attendance, conference presentation, and then journal publication. Results show that there is a tendency to move from conference attendance, to conference presentation, and journal publication, but not a whole movement with many papers being lost in the process. We also find that there are more authors moving from conference attendance to presentation in ICIS than AMCIS, which was unexpected. Introduction

In the IS field, impact of one’s research on the field is measured by the ranking of journals in which one published. These journal lists or rankings are an integral part of the promotion and tenure (P&T) application process. Researchers need to establish a research portfolio with the journal lists or rankings in mind as the promotion process necessitates a presentation of research that is consistent with the standards at the researchers institution. For the researcher, they need to publish in journals that are recognized in these journal lists to strengthen their P&T application. Researcher do not only use journal lists to decide where to publish, as other factors might come into play. These are factors such as whether they have a social connection with the journal, such as knowing the editor or reviewer, having publishing history with the journal, or having a research project that fits with the journals publication history. In developing papers to be published in the top journals, we typically do not submit out first attempt. Normally papers benefit from the write, feedback, and rewrite process. This means that the initial paper tends to be less refined and submitting such paper to a journal is frowned upon during the journal review process. Rather we seek out the feedback of others to identify weaknesses in logic, methodology, and the paper in general. We can first receive valuable feedback from our colleagues by having them informally review our work. A more formal strategy is to submit preliminary versions of the paper to conferences. Even if not accepted for presentation, conferences are a good venue, and attending a conference can lead to finding new ideas, meeting colleagues with similar interests, and seeing what areas of research are the hot new topics. Submission or publication at a conference aids in the development of the paper by both formal and informal review. First, we receive a formal opinion from two to three reviewers and the track chairs. Then we gain informal feedback during the presentation of our paper. The presentation portion is usually a self- selecting audience where attendees would be those researchers that have some interest in your topic and therefore should include some experts or some people that have done work in your field of study. The presentation usually has a Q&A session that acts as a very informal review process. This is also when you might find like-minded researchers for future feedback or even co-authorships. While the formal and informal review process at conferences are less rigorous than the journal review process, our research can gain valuable feedback and this allows the re-working of the research project to improve the output of the final paper. After getting feedback and reworking in the previous stages, our paper is ready for submission to a journal. This process may not result in submission or acceptance at a top journal. Many papers do not make it to the top journals or may even not be submitted to journals after the conference presentation. After

1 Track Title interaction with others, authors may self-select to submit to lower level journals or may abandon the research altogether. The current research seeks to investigate the connection between conference attendance, conference presentations, and finally journal paper publication in the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) or the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), and the Information Systems Senior Scholars Basket of Eight Journals (Basket8). The ultimate goal of this research is to validate the research roadmap of publication from conferences to Basket8 publication. We hope to show evidence that the pattern of conference attendance, to conference presentation and journal publication roadmap and also justify the attendance/presentation at conferences as a means to publish at a journal. The Information Systems (IS) field is diverse in methodology, topic and geography (Banville, 1989). However origins of IS research has traditionally been anchored in North America (NA). The self-reflection research at the ICIS or AMCIS conferences is not new. We found evidence of past studies of the AMCIS conference, one looking from a French philosophy perspective (Monod, 2004), from a IT research trends perspective (Becker et al., 2004), and a general philosophy trend perspective (Steel et al. 2007). In the ICIS conference we found many papers written about the ICIS conference, some of which tried to justify the existence of the ICIS conference (Culnan and Huff, 1986), looked at the ICIS conference social network (Xu and Chau, 2006), and looked at multiple conferences and how design science research has developed in them (Olbrich, 2009). While studying the conference data in a conference paper is not new, we proposed to start looking at the evidence of a roadmap of conference attendance, publication to journal publication, which to our knowledge, has not been attempted. Our current research will try to continue this tradition of analyzing the ICIS and AMCIS conference data, by adding to the discourse. The ICIS conference, begun in 1980, is considered “the most prestigious gathering of information systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world” (http://aisnet.org/page/ICISPage). The ICIS conference has been traditionally been centered in NA but that trend has changed in the past decade or so. The first ICIS conference was held in Philadelphia. The first decade of the conference was held in NA, with the 11th conference in 1990 held in Copenhagen, Denmark. We saw expansion into Europe, which is a logical second region for IS, at a somewhat cautious rate, with Amsterdam, Netherlands in 1995, and Helsinki, Finland in 1998. We also saw another non-US, but still NA conference in Vancouver, Canada in 1994. The first non-NA, non-European conference was held in Brisbane, Australia in 2000. We saw a return to Europe in 2002 with Barcelona, Spain. Since 2007, the non-US venue has increased in rate with Montreal, Canada in 2007, Paris, France in 2008, Shanghai, China in 2011, Milan, Italy in 2013, Auckland, New Zealand, in 2014, Dublin, Ireland last year, and Seoul, South Korea this year. The NA centric nature of ICIS can be seen with the first 27 conferences being held, 22 times in NA (21 in the USA and once in Canada), four times in Europe, and once in Australia. The last 11 years, counting this year, we see more variety as we had five times in NA (four US, one Canada), three times in Europe, and three times in the Asia-Pacific region. This is due to the commitment by the Association for Information Systems (AIS) to make ICIS a more international conference and having a three region rotation of region 1 (the Americas), region 2 (Europe, Africa, Middle East), region 3 (Asia/Pacific) (http://aisnet.org/?AISConferenceChart). While NA, Europe, and Asia/Pacific have been well represented in the past 11 years, we still do not see any conferences, or scheduled conferences in South America, Africa, nor the Middle East. The current study looks at the output and attendance of the ICIS conference since 2008. The AMCIS conference, begun in 1995, is a regional conference but is considered a high level IS conference, arguably only second to ICIS. AMCIS is “viewed as one of the leading conferences for presenting the broadest variety of research done by and for IS/IT academicians.” (http://aisnet.org/page/AMCISPage). Given that AMCIS is in the Americas which includes NA, where many high level conferences, journals, and academic programs in IS reside, AMCIS is a natural home for much startup research in the IS field. While the ICIS conference has been held since 1980, there was a need for emerging research to be heard at the conference level in the Americas region. Since the inception of AMCIS, the conference has taken a US centric approach to an Americas centric approach. The initial eleven conferences were all held in the US with the twelfth event in 2006 moving to Acapulco, Mexico. Since then, the conference has had a flavor for being an Americas or Western hemisphere conference. While most conferences are held in US cities, we have seen since Acapulco, Toronto, Canada in 2008, Lima, Peru in 2010, Puerto Rico in 2015, and a future conference scheduled in Cancun, Mexico in 2019.

2 Thirty Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, Auckland 2014 Conference Attendance, Presentation, to Publication

While the conference has a distinct Americas flavor to it, it does accept papers from researchers from all over the world. The AMCIS conference in recent years has started to accept papers written in Spanish and Portuguese in addition to English. The AMCIS conference has been organized by the AIS. The current study looks at the output of the AMCIS conference since 2007 and the attendance since 2008. AIS is also the organization that has helped specify a set of “top tier” IS journals. Historically in IS, the top tier IS journals included only two journals that were identified in the Financial Times list of business journals. These two where the Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ) and Information Systems Research (ISR). As the IS field grew, there was a growing pressure to publish in these two journals and evolved a need to identify more journals that were publishing high quality papers. The Senior Scholars of AIS originally identified six top IS journals in 2007, and then expanded to eight in 2011. These journals were, in alphabetical order; the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS), Information Systems Journal (ISJ), ISR, Journal of Information Technology (JIT), Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS), Journal of the AIS (JAIS), and MISQ. The two journals not in the original basket of six were JIT and JSIS. EJIS, ISJ, and JSIS are the only UK based journals and the remaining five are based in the US. The current study looks at the output of these journals from 2007 to 2016. Since we are focusing on the Basket8 journals we are interested in A-level journals. We acknowledge that other journals exist at the B, C, and, D levels but we are interested in how ICIS or AMCIS papers can become high level journal publications. The remainder of the paper will continue as follows. We will look at the methodology and data taking process. We will then show results from our study and finish with a discussion, possible future research, limitations to our study, and a conclusion. Methodology

In this research, we want to test the model that ideas in the ICIS/AMCIS conference leads to publication in top journals of the IS field. While ideally, we would want to identify genealogical descendants of ICIS/AMCIS papers found in the top journals, but we recognize that this would be a daunting activity. Prior to undertaking that activity, for this paper, we have attempted a two step process to identify author attendance at ICIS/AMCIS to presentation at ICIS/AMCIS, then author presentation at ICIS/AMCIS to publication in the top journals of the IS field. We recognize that this is an extremely high level measure, but we believe that it will identify for us, the basic trends in publication and allow us to identify whether the more detailed approach will prove fruitful. If we do not find evidence of publication between ICIS/AMCIS and the Basket8, this will allow us to identify if there is a high level of evidence that authors who present at ICIS/AMCIS tend to move on to not publish in Basket8 journals or just decide not publish at all. To perform this analysis, we gathered the ICIS/AMCIS attendance lists and created a list of ICIS/AMCIS attendees from 2007 to 2016. We also gathered the ICIS/AMCIS proceedings authors for the same period. We assume that the ICIS/AMCIS proceeding authors presented their research at an ICIS/AMCIS conference, as conference presentation is usually a requirement for publication in the conference proceedings. We also created a Basket8 journal author list for the same period. Data Collection

Data was collected for attendance data for the ICIS/AMCIS conference via AIS published registration lists, presentation data via the proceedings of the ICIS/AMCIS conference, and the publication data of the Basket8 journals. Attendance Data

Attendance data for ICIS was taken from 2007 to 2016, and for AMCIS data was taken from 2008 to 2016. One of the authors has been saving the last conference registration file for these conferences from 2007/2008 to 2015. The list was compiled by AIS and put on the conference website. Many of the ICIS/AMCIS conference websites have been since taken down and historical data is not available for public collection at this time. Currently the oldest ICIS conference website that has not been taken down is the 2016 Dublin conference, and the oldest AMCIS conference website that has not been taken down is

3 Track Title the 2012 Seattle conference. In the last couple of years we have also seen a move to make this data available on the AIS website as currently the ICIS 2015, AMCIS 2016, and ICIS 2016 registration data are available (https://aisnet.org/general/custom.asp?page=confreglist). The authors had the 2015 registration list from the Fort Worth conference website but opted to use the ICIS 2015, and ICIS 2016 Excel files from the AIS website. AMCIS and ICIS are unique in that they did and continue to publish the registration lists on their conference website. One author has been keeping yearly notes on other regional AIS conferences such as the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) and Pacific Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) and has not see any registration data being consistently published by the other conferences outside of AMCIS or ICIS. The majority of the old data, outside of the AIS available 2015 and 2016 data, is in PDF format. The PDF files were converted to Excel and all authorship data was kept in one Excel file. One year of AMCIS data, for 2013 in Chicago, did not allow transfer from PDF to Excel format. Thus the AMCIS conference attendance data is only taken for 2008 to 2016, except 2013. Publication Data

The ICIS/AMCIS conference publication data was downloaded as a bibliometric file from the AIS e-library (https://aisnet.org/?AISeLibrary). All ICIS/AMCIS data is available in the AIS e-library site (Incidentally, since the original data was taken from the aisnet.org website, the data has been removed and will not be updated due to privacy issues, according to a query made by the author to an AIS representative at the 2018 ICIS conference in San Francisco). The data was then transferred into a CSV (comma separated value) file and put into an Excel file. Data for all years from 2007 to 2016 were put into one Excel file. Multiple authors were counted equally and not normalized. That is if a paper had two authors, both authors got one count, same as a paper with a single author. Author affiliation data was taken using the publication data at time of publication. Basket of Eight Publication Data

The Basket8 journal publication data was taken for all articles between 2007 and 2016. The authors affiliation, birthplace, citizenship, residence, and terminal degree granting institution was not used in this study, but may be of interest in future studies. Multiple authors were counted equally and not normalized. The data source for the Basket8 journals was from a university library search. Most data was taken from Proquest with JSIS being taken from Science Direct, ISR being taken from Informs Online, and ISJ being taken from EBSCOhost. Problems arose where Proquest did not have all data covering the years 2007 to 2016, thus the reason for using different databases for differing journals. All library database sites allowed a sweep over multiple years making it easy for creating output files in RIS format that can be read by the Zotero bibliographic tool. The one exception was the Informs Online database that required issue-by-issue copies of files to be produced. Table 1 shows the number of articles found for each journal during the time frame of 2007 to 2016.

Table 1. Number of articles captured for each journal during the years 2007 to 2016, in alphabetical order, UK journals are indicated, others are published in the US

European Journal of Information Systems (UK) 473 Information Systems Journal (UK) 289 Information Systems Research 497 Journal of Information Technology 317 Journal of Management Information Systems 394 Journal of Strategic Information Systems (UK) 340 Journal of the Association for Information Systems 352 Management Information Systems Quarterly 448

4 Thirty Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, Auckland 2014 Conference Attendance, Presentation, to Publication

The coverage of availability for journal articles in 2017 was going to be varied depending on the journal. Some may have an embargo period of a few months for recent articles, i.e. articles published in 2017. Some may have accepted articles on their websites pre-publication. In order to streamline the data taking process, and to have the same time period for all Basket8 journals we decided to cut off the journal publication to include only up to those that were published in 2016. Data Analysis

All data was put into an Excel file. The RIS output data was imported into a Zotero database and then exported into a CSV file. The CSV file was then read into Excel. Some data manipulation was done such as creating a file so that each author was connected to only a year. For example, for the ICIS/AMCIS attendance data and ICIS/AMCIS presentation data was manipulated so that author names were only attached to the year of attendance or presentation. We also needed to remove commas between names and extra spacing. We also needed to remove semicolons from Baseket8 author listings. The semicolons were entered by Zotero as a separator between authors. We performed splitting of author/attendee name information into first and last names. We removed extra spacing before and after names. This allows only the first and last names to be in their separate cells. This was operationalized using Excel and a Java program. The Excel database was then put into a Java program to analyze the occurrence of an author in the dataset. We measured two separate main datasets. One was to see if an author attended the ICIS/AMCIS conference and subsequently presented at the ICIS/AMCIS conference. The second was to see if an author presented at an ICIS/AMCIS conference and then published in a Basket8 journal. The time difference was only analyzed using year data. That is the ICIS/AMCIS attendance, ICIS/AMCIS presentation, and Basket8 publication data tied an individual name to a year. So for and ICIS/AMCIS attendee to be counted as presented in a subsequent conference, the year data was compared to make sure the attendance preceded the presentation. Similarly the ICIS/AMCIS presentation had to precede the Basket8 journal publication. Only author name was used in this preliminary study. We note that we did not look at the publication title nor read the papers. We also did not identify authors with identical names by looking at affiliation or any other meta-data on the author. While the ultimate goal of this study is to look at individual research paper/stream from ICIS/AMCIS presentation to Basket8 journal publication, given the amount of data, and the fact that author lists change, titles to paper change, and content changes, we feel that such detail is not necessary for an exploratory study. Results

Table 2 illustrates the statistics comparing ICIS/AMCIS attendance, presentation and Basket8 publications. Keep in mind that the ICIS attendance data included 10 years of data from 2007 to 2016, while the AMCIS attendance data included eight years of data from 2008 to 2016 missing 2013. Table 2. Statistics Comparing AMCIS and ICIS Attendance and Presentation, and Basket8 Publication Total Unique ICIS Attendees 13129 5952 ICIS Presenting Authors 13107 5951 ICIS Attendance to Presenting Authors N/A 1964 AMCIS Attendees 6931 4362 AMCIS Presenting Authors 23602 12394 AMCIS Attendance to Presenting Authors N/A 1072 Basket8 Papers 2954 4070 unique authors

5 Track Title

ICIS Presenting Author to Basket8 Author N/A 654 AMCIS Presenting Author to Basket8 Author N/A 575

Comparing the conferences we can see that ICIS is a much more popular conference as far as attendance. This is expected as ICIS is the premier academic conference in IS and AMCIS is a regional conference. We do see that AMCIS has more authorship compared to ICIS and this is somewhat expected as there may be less stringent acceptance criteria in a regional conference and AMCIS may be more open to papers that are less developed. Surprisingly we do see less AMCIS authors moving from conference attendance to conference presentation, as there is almost a double number of ICIS attendance to conference presentation compared to AMCIS. Finally another unexpected result is that there is about the same number of authors that have presented at AMCIS compared to ICIS that publish in the Basket8 journals. With the difference in number of years of data, this number becomes even closer. Discussion

We have looked at the trend of attendance at the ICIS/AMCIS conference, to ICIS/AMCIS presentation, to publication in the Basket8 journals. We see some evidence of the effect of ICIS/AMCIS representation showing up in the Basket8 journal publications. This research provides evidence for the first time that shows that the idea of using conference attendance and publication as a preparatory step to top journal publication may be widespread among IS scholars. Such a trend would be evidence that would support the notion that authors have a careerist approach to publication. Seeing as tenure and promotion are dependent upon publication in prescribed journals in many cases, authors seeking to achieve publication may use conferences as preparatory steps to achieve this goal. Future Research

Future work should include tracking individual papers and authors from attendance at conferences to publication at journals. A genealogical connections study would trace research from the conference paper to a journal paper. Additionally, AMCIS data can be considered for future research. Unfortunately, other conferences outside of ICIS and AMCIS cannot follow the same method, as ECIS and PACIS do not offer registration lists or attendee lists. We would also like to expand our journal data to those outside of the Basket8 list. In addition we would like to expand our dataset to include a longer time stripe with more years of data. While this exploratory study is a first attempt at linking attendance to journal publication, there is a much larger pool of data available and we hope to contribute to the methodology in getting and analyzing this data. Another possible study would look into author information. Author counts can be used to normalize the data, making single authored papers count more for an author than multiple authored papers. Authorship list location, such as first author, second author, and third author can be used to normalize counts as well. In addition author information such as authors affiliation, birthplace, citizenship, residence, and terminal degree granting institution can be used to expand our research to include influences of country or institutions. Limitations

There are several key limitations to this study. First we only looked at two conferences and eight journals. The data set is very limited. We also were limited in the years of data that was available for attendance. While the older data may not be available, the fact that AIS is now publishing attendance data is an encouraging sign. Second, we found some issues with the data. Often the data was dirty and needed cleaning. This was especially true of the attendance data as the files were inconsistent. The country and institution information was not available for the years before 2011. The registration type was available only from

6 Thirty Fifth International Conference on Information Systems, Auckland 2014 Conference Attendance, Presentation, to Publication

2011. Often data such as institution and country were missing or obviously wrong. We also found mistakes more frequent in the registration list. Author name information did not seem to match their publication formats. This might be due to conference attendees using nicknames or other formats for their conference registration. Often the registration list was only given as a courtesy and was not published to the higher standards of a conference proceeding, or more rigorous Basket8 publication. Same authors may use different name from conference attendance to presentation to publication. Another problem is that conference presentation does not necessarily mean conference attendance. One can present at ICIS/AMCIS without attending. We also used author name as a proxy of authors attending, then presenting at the conference and finally publishing in the basket8 journals. We only took data from author showing up in attendee list, and then showing up as presenter in conference proceedings to showing up in Basket8 journal as an author. The links of the papers may not even be the same paper. Multiple authors showing up in any list is only counted once. We recognize that authors work on the same topic and thus can author multiple papers through the publication roadmap. We also did not take into account author placement on the author list, nor the number of authors in each paper. Finally we only linked from earliest conference attendance to conference presentation, and then earliest conference presentation to Basket8 publication, also nullifying any multiple streams of research in the roadmap. Conclusion

This study is an exploratory study that as far as we know, is a first one to attempt to tie conference attendance, to conference presentation and then to journal publication. We found that the ICIS conference was more popular to attend but the AMCIS conference seemed more open to presentations. This was expected given the reputation of ICIS as the best academic conference in IS and AMCIS as a regional conference. Surprisingly we found that ICIS has a more open path compared to AMCIS from conference attendance to conference presentation, and the path from conference presentation to Basket8 publication was about the same for the two conferences. These findings should be analyzed further as we have pointed out some limitations to the current study. Expansion to other IS conferences and tracking each paper stream is fairly prohibitive due to AMCIS and ICIS being the only two IS conferences that publish registration lists each year, and the amount of work required to track each paper through the publication roadmap. However, we feel that this paper is an initial attempt to track the ICIS and AMCIS conference to having an impact on the A-level journal publication in the IS field. References Bibliography

AIS net AMCIS page http://aisnet.org/page/AMCISPage AIS e-library https://aisnet.org/?AISeLibrary AIS net ICIS page http://aisnet.org/page/ICISPage Banville, C., and Landry, M. 1989. "Can the Field of MIS be Disciplined?" Communications of the ACM (32:3), pp 48-60. Becker, J., Ibragimova, B., Jones, M. 2004 “The Trends in IS/IT Research for AMCIS Conferences: 1995 to 2004 (The Early Years): Research in Progress” Proceedings of the AMCIS Conference. Culnan, Mary J. and Huff, Sid, "Panel 10: Back to The Future: Will There be an ICiS in 1996?" (1986). ICIS 1986 Proceedings. 11. Monod, E., 2004 “French Theories in IS Research: An Exploratory study on ICIS, AMCIS and MISQ” Proceedings of the AMCIS Conference Olbrich, Sebastian, "Reflecting the Past Decades of ICIS, ECIS and AMCIS Proceedings - A Design Science Perspective" (2009). ICIS 2009 Proceedings. 116. Steel, D., Porra, J., Parks, M., 2007 “Ten Years of The Philosophical Foundations Mini-Track at AMCIS – Some Patters” Proceedings of the AMCIS Conference Xu, Jennifer and Chau, Michael, "The Social Identity of IS: Analyzing the Collaboration Network of the ICIS Conferences (1980-2005)" (2006). ICIS 2006 Proceedings. 39.

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