The Effects of the Quantification of Faculty Productivity: Perspectives from the Design Science Research Community

In recent years, efforts to assess faculty research productivity have become more focused on the measurable quantification of academic outcomes. For benchmarking academic performance, different ranking and rating lists have been developed that define what is regarded as high-quality research. While many scholars in IS consider lists such as the Senior Scholar’s Basket (SSB) to be good guidance, others who belong to less-mainstream groups of the discipline could perceive these lists as constraining. In this study, we analyze the perceived impact of the SSB on Information Systems (IS) academics working in sub-disciplines of IS and how it affected their research behavior. We explore perceptions of the Design Science Research (DSR) community, an exemplar sub-discipline, regarding the SSB and compare these with actual research outcomes. We found the DSR community felt a strong normative influence from the SSB. While the belief is that DSR research is difficult to publish in journals of the SSB, since it is not mainstream IS research, we actually show that the DSR community successfully published research in SSB journals, e.g., by changing their methodology. We conclude that lists, potentially perceived as constraining, can have a positive effect in shielding a discipline from others and guiding a community towards a certain goal, even if the perception of the community is different.