This chapter characterizes the publication activity of Information Systems success by data collected from the Science Citation Index and Social Science Citation Index databases from ISI Web of Science during 2001 to 2010. It provides insights into the research activities of Information Systems success research and identifies patterns, tendencies, or regularities existing in the literature related to authors, journals, institutes, and countries. A co-ocurrence analysis of keywords is made to indicate the core themes research areas in the literature and new emerging topics. It is found that the IS success literature has a positive growth rate, and it is likely to continue with this tendency in the future. However, the analysis shows the need to set up a common language framework that serves as a guide to researchers to develop a most mature body of knowledge.
TopIntroduction
Information systems success has become one of the most important streams of research in the IS literature (Urbach, Smolnik, & Riempp, 2009). Studies on information systems success has grown fast in recent decades and has impacted a variety of fields and contexts such as web-based and e-commerce (DeLone & McLean, 2004; Garrity, Glassberg, Kim, Sanders, & Shin, 2005), eGoverment (Wang & Liao, 2008), clinical and health (Heeks, 2006; van der Meijden, Tange, Troost, & Hasman, 2003; Page, 2000), inter-organizational (Lu, Huang, & Heng, 2006), project management (Yen, Li, & Niehoff, 2008), developing countries (Heeks, 2002), and measurement (DeLone & McLean, 2004; Floropoulos, Spathis, Halvatzis, & Tsipouridou, 2010; Jen & Chao, 2008; Petter, DeLone, & McLean, 2008).
Despite of a high growth rate, the assessment of the research productivity in a quantitatively and systematic way about the scientific global production is not found in the literature, at the best of our knowledge. The scarcity in this type of information related to IS success research creates the need for a systematic global analysis which rather than individual studies, allows exploring the intellectual core and some properties of the research stream (Holsapple, 2008). This kind of analysis offers support to practitioners and theorists giving insights about the positioning of the scientific community and allowing the creation of research agendas, contact making and social network creation at the individual, institutional and national levels. For this approach, the methods, principles and techniques related to bibliometrics used in different disciplines of science and engineering (Keiser & Utzinger, 2005; Tang & Thelwall, 2003) were used in the IS success domain analysis. Thus, the present chapter uses bibliometrics to analyze literature with the purpose of having a better understanding of the research in terms of trends, core themes and productivity patterns in the IS success domain. Analyzing this patterns give us linkages among the most influential topics, to explore subfields, and to derive their potential relationships. Thus, we provide an assessment of the field of IS success in its evolution during the last decade, an overview of its key topics and some insights about future trends.
Bibliometric techniques are methods based on mathematical analysis, especially statistics, to asses and quantify attributes from a research subject such as the articles embedded in international journals literature (Abramo, D'Angelo, & Caprasecca, 2009) in order to evaluate quality and efficiency. These methods are non invasive, simple to implement, allowing rapid inter-temporal comparison with more quantitative data (Moed, De Bruin, Nederhof, & Tijssen, 1991). Then, an attempt is made to carry forward bibliometric analysis of the ‘IS success’ literature during the years 2001 to 2010 to obtain valuable results in order to generate the interest from new researcher and continue supporting so far been.