69 THE ROLE OF CONFERENCES AND REFEREED JOURNALS IN AUSTRALIAN INFORMATION SYSTEMS RESEARCH 15

The premise of this paper is the need for the IS discipline in Australia to identify its nature and traditions before promulgating both to gain greater access to political power and resources. The survey results reported help characterise Australian IS research by assessing the significance of conference publications and determining which international and national conferences and refereed journals are perceived by leading IS researchers to be the most appropriate and of the highest quality as publication outlets. Comparison is made between the results of this study and North American rankings. Results from the study support the claim that refereed conference publications are significant to IS researchers and help legitimise this style of publication