The reality of information systems research - Information Systems Foundations: Constructing and Criticising - page 25

3. The reality of information systems
research
John Lamp, School of Information Systems, Deakin Univer-
sity
Simon Milton, Department of Information Systems, Univer-
sity of Melbourne
Abstract
The examination of a practical issue with a web site has led, in this paper, directly to
the consideration of the need for, and an assessment of the impact of, an approach based
on fundamental theories of 'what is', to examine what information systems research is
and the relations of its component areas of endeavour. The paper presents an examination
of the use of the philosophical field of ontologies, and specifically the use of the ontolo-
gical approaches upon which to base categories of information systems research activities.
This theoretical analysis is intended to be used as the basis from which to develop a
methodology to undertake the development of the categorial scheme for the web site
that initiated the research.
Introduction
Since 1995, one of the authors (JL) has been maintaining a resource on the World Wide
Web with the basic aim of providing a central point from which academic authors
publishing in the information systems domain can obtain useful information on the
publications serving that domain (Lamp, 1995). The database now contains information
on 349 journals, and was accessed over 7500 times in February 2004. As the number of
journals included in the database increases, so also does the difficulty of accurately
identifying journals relevant to a particular query from within the database. There is a
basic searching facility that simply matches a search term to descriptive entries in the
database but, in common with most text searches implemented on a relational database
management system (DBMS), there is no facility for maintaining result sets and refining
searches through the manipulation of result sets (Ramakrishnan and Gehrke, 2003).
A number of users have asked whether it would be possible to categorise the journals
according to their subject area. This has led to a research project, the full scope of which
has been reported elsewhere (Lamp and Milton, 2003), but a key part of which is the
determination of relevant categorisation schemes for information systems research, and
the relations between those categories. It has also raised important questions about the
nature of the discipline of information systems, the journals themselves, the articles
published in them, and the readers of those journals. A key finding of Lamp and Milton
(2003) was the lack of widespread adoption of any categorial scheme over the domain
of information systems research. This is in apparent contradiction with views expressed
by information systems researchers, as researchers and as journal editors (Lamp, 2002),
supporting the need for such a scheme.