Article Preview
TopIntroduction
As an emerging and applied inter-discipline, Information Systems (IS) has engaged great interest of scholars and practitioners since 1975 (Burton Swanson & Ramiller, 1993; Ives, Hamilton, & Davis, 1980; Taylor, Wingen, & Wingen, 2010; Zmud, 2003). Unlike traditional disciplines of business research, the scope and topics of IS research are always changing with the advancement and application of information technologies (Grover & Lyytinen, 2015; N. R. Hassan, Mingers, & Stahl, 2018). Although the diversity and adaptability of the research themes in the IS field have make this discipline practically significant, it might threaten the academic rigor (Avison & Elliot, 2006; Bakshi & Krishna, 2007; Banville, 1989; Córdoba & Paucar-Caceres, 2018; Robey, 2003; Taylor et al., 2010; Zmud, 2003), confuse the future research directions, and hinder the development of IS academic studies. Thus, the exploration of IS discipline has become an increasingly concerned issue (Jeyaraj & Zadeh, 2019b)(Jeyaraj & Zadeh, 2019a)[30] .
Recognized this, researchers have attempted to explore the various aspect of IS disciplines by conducting systematic review, such as the intellectual core of the IS research (Larsen & Levine, 2005; Sidorova, Evangelopoulos, Valacich, & Ramakrishnan, 2008), the collaboration network of IS scholars (Gallivan & Ahuja, 2015; Xu, 2014), knowledge concepts/themes in IS journals (Jeyaraj & Zadeh, 2019a; Lee & Chen, 2012), the maturity of the IS topics (Córdoba & Paucar-Caceres, 2018; Wade, Biehl, & Kim, 2006), the diversity of IS research over time (Bernroider, Pilkington, & Córdoba, 2013; Liu, Li, Goncalves, Kostakos, & Xiao, 2016), and the impacts of journals, authors, and articles (Khan & Trier, 2018; Taylor, Dillon, & Van Wingen, 2008). However, there are two gaps of these review research. First, majority of these review articles only cover a limited number of journals during a particular period for a specific topic. For instance, Khan and Trier (2018) collected 3587 articles published in eight AIS journals between 1995 and 2014 to examine academic performance of IS researchers. Second, based on incomplete data and different techniques, such as classification (Vessey, Ramesh, & Glass, 2002), co-word analysis (Liu et al., 2016), content analysis (Córdoba & Paucar-Caceres, 2018) and social network analysis (Vidgen, Henneberg, & Naudé, 2007), to analyze different data, such as abstracts, keywords, titles, citation frequency, and authors, these reviews provided rather mixed results. In light of these considerations, it is necessary to conduct a systematic and comprehensive literature review to uncover the intellectual structure and the evolutionary process of IS field, identify its promising research topics, and put forward an agenda for future research.