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Surely, the paper has would win the award for “Best eye-catching paper title”.

Frey, B. S. (2002) Publishing as prostitution? – Choosing between one’s own ideas and academic success. Public choice, 116: 205-223.

Survival in academia depends on publications in refereed journals. Authors only get their papers accepted if they intellectually prostitute themselves by slavishly following the demands made by anonymous referees who have no property rights to the journals they advise. Intellectual prostitution is neither beneficial to suppliers nor consumers. But it is avoidable. The editor (with property rights to the journal) should make the basic decision of whether a paper is worth publishing or not. The referees should only offer suggestions for improvement. The author may disregard this advice. This reduces intellectual prostitution and produces more original publications.

However, a quick look at the Standards of MIS Quarterly reveals that

[a]ssociate editors are guided by the recommendations of reviewers, but they do not necessarily comply with the majority recommendation of the reviewers. Instead, they are required to make their own judgment on the merits of a paper. Similarly, senior editors are guided by the recommendations of reviewers and associate editors, but they are required to make their own judgments on the merits of a paper.

The paper still has to fit the world view of the editors, tough . And my guess would be, that these guys can spot the flaws of a paper viewed from a mile away.

Some good advice on how to publish your research can be found here:

Lee, A.S. “Crafting a paper for publication,” Communications of the Association of Information Systems (20:7), 2007, pp. 33-40.

To sum it up, that is the main question everyone is asking when reviewing a paper.
However, when is it ok to accept the claims of the author?

Adapted from [1], I found this set of questions very helpful in determining whether to believe or not to believe:

1. What is the paper about?
2. What is the central claim?
3. What would be a good set of arguments to substantiate this claim
4. What are the actuals arguments brought forward by the author?
5. Why does the author establish these specific arguments
6. What is the quality of the arguments?

I think No. 3 is the most important question. Answering this question will also help in suggesting improvements in the review.

[1] Bördlein, C (2002): Das sockenfressende Monster in der Waschmaschine. Eine Einführung ins skeptische Denken (in German). Alibri, Aschaffenburg.

While surfing the web, I think I found a little gem for managing citations and references in your papers: Zotero.

Screenshot of zotero (from http://www.zotero.org)

Zotero allows you to manage all your references from inside the Firefox. Since the web is the primary site for finding reference anyway, it reduces all the hassle with copying data from the web into other applications, download RIS-files and import them again,… all that time-consuming work.

Since managing literature references, journal papers, annotations, notes etc. is a crucial part of a researcher’s (work) life, you would assume there are plenty of tools out there to help us? Right you are, but most of them are -let me phrase it politely- hard to use.

The one I am using is Endnote. The appearance of Endnote is very old-fashioned and its usability is poor. They release a new version of Endnote every year, but the differences are marginal. For instance, once they announced a alphabetically ordered entry type list (book before journal before thesis) as new feature! On the bright side, Endnote allows to add citations and bibliographies to Word documents fairly easily.

What Endnote completely fails to do, is to provide features that help you to actually work with the literature in the database. It provides a notes area, you can enter keywords, but in a very basic (and thus mostly useless) way.

So what’s better with Zotero? A lot:
- You can grab literature directly from the web/database
- You can import literature
- You can add notes, pdfs, links as many as you like
- You can tag literature and browse by tag
- It is open source
- It comes with a word plugin
- You can export to many common formats

Especially tagging literature and search by tag is a very useful feature. It helps when you go like “Once upon a time, I read something about it, but I don’t remember author, title or the journal it was published in”. With Zotero you just browse your tag cloud.

Disclaimer: Zotero is still in a sort of beta phase, but I already use it regularly without much of a hassle.

Ui, this was an exciting week.

However, the best part of the week was the ECIS doctoral consortium. It took place at 1600 meters above sea level in the Swiss alps. This is the view from my room:

I checked whether you could buy land there, but it is not possible. During the winter the whole valley is not passable. They do not have broadband internet there. But I will definitely return for vacational purposes .

So, what are the main take-aways from the DC?

• I got to know to 18 people from across Europe (my future competitors and/or my future allies )
• I realized how diverse the IS discipline is
• It takes some time to explain the “German-style” research
• I now know how to make cheese (it involves getting up at sun rise, processing 400 liters of cow milk and 100 liters of goat milk a day, getting to bed at sun set - but the cheese maker appeared to be a very happy man)

Of course, I got some very useful comments on my PhD proposal. I now have to start to digest the comments…

Erik van Heck (Professor at RSM Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands) presented a hiking-oriented view on getting to the the PhD top:

The first top is roughly around the time when you have finished your PhD proposal (so that is where I am). As you can see, a long and obviously rainy journey lays ahead. Furthermore, the actual PhD top is not yet in sight (some clouds, I suppose).

Overall, the DC provided me with an umbrella and some good hiking boots for the long journey. Thanks to everyone!

The theme of ECIS 2007 was “Relevant rigor - rigorous relevance” which connects to the relevance debate among (mostly) American IS researchers.

At a first glance, you could assume that rigor and relevance are equally important. But the theme actually says different. Rigor is just a side contraint. Of course, research has to be rigor in order to be research. But not for the sake of rigor. So, according to the ECIS theme, above everything in IS research should be relevance. It is the main guideline of IS research. So we should be rigorously relevant. The only question is: relevant to whom?

I have taken notes of two presentations in the IS research methods track which propose solutions on how to operationalize the ECIS theme.

Check it out. The solution is carefully hidden in my notes on the ECIS-panel on “How to publish in top IS journals”.

I didn’t know it was that easy