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The International Journal of IT Standards and Standardization Research (JITSR) provides a forum for theoretical and practical research into IT standardization. This paper presents a citation analysis of JITSR. Its originally stated overall scope is:
To be a platform for presenting, and discussing, the broad variety of aspects that make up IT standards research. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, contributions from the disciplines of computer science, information systems, management, business, social sciences (especially science and technology studies), economics, engineering, political science, public policy, sociology, communication, and human factors/usability. In particular, the journal wants to both support and promote multi-disciplinary research on IT standards; 'IT' should be understood in a very broad sense. (JITSR, 2011)
Thus, JITSR invites both monodisciplinary and interdisciplinary papers from a wide array of angles. Given its interdisciplinary focus, the journal’s papers combine contributions from different scientific disciplines and therefore we would expect articles in the journal to cite research in journals outside of the field of standardization, and papers in journals beyond the field of standardization to cite publications in JITSR. We explore these issues in this paper. More specifically, our objective is to analyze the impact of research into IT standardization. The primary question is: is JITSR recognized as an interdisciplinary journal and if so, to what extent are articles published in JITSR cited in publications in other disciplines?
We perform a citation analysis of JITSR and focus on core scientometric data used to estimate the journal’s impact. This includes the journal’s two-year and five-year impact factor, the immediacy index, and the cited half-life. Furthermore, we assess to what extent publications are cited in other disciplines and examine the interdisciplinary character of research on IT standardization.
We start with an overview of the state of the art in IT standardization research reflecting on De Vries (2002). Subsequently, we describe our methodology. Then, we present our results and we compare these results with other journals. We conclude with a discussion of the contributions and limitations.