This paper reports an analysis of the proportion of faculty publishing articles in premier business journals (i.e., the ratio of authors of premier business journal articles to total faculty of a discipline) across the disciplines of accounting, finance, management, marketing, and information systems (IS) for the years 1994─2003. This analysis revealed that over this period the management discipline had on average the highest proportion of faculty publishing in premier journals (12.7 authors per 100 management faculty), followed by finance (9.4 authors per 100 faculty), marketing (9.2 authors per 100 faculty), IS (5.5 authors per 100 faculty), and accounting (4.8 authors per 100 faculty). A further analysis examined these ratios for the different disciplines over time, finding that the ratios of authors to faculty have actually decreased for the disciplines of marketing and IS over this time period but have remained stable for the disciplines of accounting, management, and finance. Given steady growth in faculty size of all disciplines, the proportion of faculty publishing articles in premier journals in 2003 for all disciplines is lower than their 10-year averages, with IS having the lowest proportion in 2003. A sensitivity analysis reveals that without substantial changes that would allow more IS faculty to publish in the premier journals (e.g., by increasing publication cycles, number of premier outlets, and so on), IS will continue to lag far below the average of other disciplines. The implications of these findings for IS researchers, for institutions and administrators of IS programs, and for the IS academic discipline are examined. Based on these implications, recommendations for the IS discipline are presented.
What constitutes excellence in information systems research for promotion and tenure? This is a question that is regularly addressed by members of promotion and tenure committees and those called upon to write external letters. While there are many elements to this question, one major element is the quality and quantity of an individual's research publications. An informal survey of senior Information Systems faculty members at 49 leading U.S. and Canadian universities found 86 percent to expect three or more articles in elite journals. In contrast, an analysis of publication performance of Ph.D. graduates between the years of 1992 and 2004 found that approximately three individuals in each graduating year of Ph.D.s (about 2 percent) published 3 or more articles in a set of 20 elite journals within 6 years of graduation. Only 15 individuals from each graduating year (11 percent) published one or more articles. As a discipline, we publish elite journal articles at a lower rate than Accounting, yet our promotion and tenure standards are higher, similar to those of Management, Marketing, and Finance. Thus, there is a growing divergence between research performance and research standards within the Information Systems discipline. As such, unless we make major changes, these differences will perpetuate a vicious cycle of increasing faculty turnover, declining influence on university affairs, and lower research productivity. We believe that we must act now to create a new future, and offer recommendations that focus on the use of more appropriate standards for promotion and tenure and ways to increase the number of articles published.