The Roles of Conference Papers in IS: An Analysis of the Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems

Information Systems (IS) research has both a journal-oriented publication culture and a rich plethora of conferences. It is unclear why IS researchers even bother with conference publishing given the high focus on journals. Against this backdrop, the purpose of this paper is to increase our understanding of conference papers in IS and the role they play for the authoring researchers. We present the first analysis of the papers published during the first six years (2010–2015) in the Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems (SCIS). We conducted interviews with ten SCIS authors. Following a framework adopted from Akerlind [1], we identified how SCIS papers have the roles of fulfilling requirements, establishing oneself, developing personally, enabling change, and other roles. This article contributes to the reflection literature on the IS field by applying a practice lens to understand the role of conference papers in research.

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