Information Systems, Dominant Paradigms, and Emerging Concepts: A Community Clustering Analysis of the Highest Impact Topics in Information Systems Research

We provide a preliminary analysis of how diverse IS research has been, based on the research topics that have had the highest impact, as measured by academic citations. Does IS have a dominant paradigm? Our analysis argues that the impact of IS research has been dominated by a single research paradigm, which we label as ‘IS acceptance’. When this analysis is repeated for the most recent decade, the highest impact topics are still dominated by ‘IS acceptance’, but are joined by three new topics, ‘IS and design’, ‘IS and strategy’, and ‘IS and expertise’. Our analysis maps the intellectual structure of the IS discipline by drawing from a wide range of publication outlets, rather than only the most prestigious IS journals, by assuming a power law distribution of citations, and by using a community structure algorithm from network analysis to identify research paradigms and emerging ideas