this IS research

Let's say we are unethical people, trying to get ahead in academia and gain accolades for the sake of promotion and income and so forth. In an age where artificial intelligence and LLMs are entering the academic enterprise, has "cheating" changed? Are there new ways of fabricating, fudging, cooking, trimming, and lying about your data, your ...

In 2026, everything is different. AI is scaling both research and publishing productivity. Impact factors no longer matter. Big name journal publishers launch offspring journals with little credentials other than the brand. How should we make sense of all this to figure out which journals are really important to our field? It is time for a n...

As usual in the final episode of the year, we hand out three awards for what we think are some of the finest pieces of information systems scholarship produced this year. Except that this time, we are live at the International Conference on Information Systems in Nashville, Tennessee, in a room packed with our listeners. While this means the...

It only took us five years but we finally got Stefan Seidel on the podcast. We have been talking about him and his scholarship for a while. Today we...

Some academics go into the office every day; some are rarely ever seen on campus. Is one way better than the other? Who better to ask than the brilliant Ella Hafermalz

A key problem in empirically oriented research, especially inductive and abductive work, is figuring out which theoretical lens or scaffold to apply to uncover novel insights. In other words, which theory should you use? We discuss a few heuristics scholars can draw on to reach a higher level of scholarly maturity, namely disposition, empiri...

Most think that algorithms are the modern root cause of innovations. But Marta Stelmaszak says not only are organizations today powered by data, they i...

When we discuss artificial intelligence, what metaphors do we use to illustrate what we mean? Is artificial intelligence some sort of robot—like Ultron—or is it an organism—like a beehive? What happens to our expectations, our thinking, and our conclusions when we change these metaphors, say, from an entitative metaphor (say, an agent) to a ...

We are together in South Bend and teach a class to PhD students in the Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame. Our joint teaching experience makes us wonder: What should all doctoral students learn or what should we all teach the next generation of IS students? We come up with Nick's rules for a good PhD education: First...

One of the big topics at the AOM 2025 conference this summer was the use of large language models in the research process, especially in qualitative ...

A new season of podcast episodes is starting and what better place to kick it off as the world's largest business and management conference. We are recording this episode at AOM 2025

Is there collusion in our field? Do we have elites running wild, making sure that their work gets published whilst the rest of us struggles to find room to publish our own work? And are we handling conflicts of interest that may exist between authors and the editors who are charged with making decisions about their work? These are serious qu...

Which research methods are better, quantitative or qualitative? What is more important, getting a richer picture of what goes on in organizations, or seeking generalizable insights about causality? This debate has raged at the very least since Glaser and Strauss popularized the grounded theory method in the mid twentieth century. In 2025, we...

We continue with our special "Ask us anything" episode to celebrate the centenary of the This IS Research podcast. This time, we handle questions such as "do we have to worry about ontology?" - No; "should we engage in community building?" Yes; and "what have you learned from the podcast?" A whole lot - and we hope you have learned a thing o...

We have an anniversary to celebrate: one hundred episodes of the This IS Research podcast. We mark the occasion by answering questions we received from our audience: Which bear is the best, who likes a hug more... and what advice would we give about starting as an assistant professor, pivoting your research, and what books to read. All this ...

In 2010, the Association for Information Systems formed a special interest group (SIGGreen) to nurture an international community of academics that study the role of digital technologies in fostering environmentally, economically and socially sustainable development. Fifteen years later, we sit down with ...

Jason Thatcher is back on the show and he is bringing decades of experiences as a journal editor.  So we decided we play a game of round robin where each of us is giving rules of what to ...

Is it okay to use large language models in the research process? For what task, exactly, and to automate the task or to augment the researcher? In this episode, we try to explore whether and how LLMs could be used in five aspects of the research process - for paper writing, reviewing, data analysis, as a subject of research, or as a surrogat...

Is there a formula for doing and publishing research on digital phenomena? And if so, it is the same formula as the scripts for IS papers of the past, or has it changed? We discuss how our field has historically worked with reference theories from other disciplines and how we have moved beyond this one way of doing and publishing research to...