KEY INFORMATION-SYSTEMS ISSUES - AN ANALYSIS OF MIS PUBLICATIONS

Reports of key MIS issues based on the perceptions of senior IS execut ives appear periodically in the MIS literature. In this article, we pr ovide another perspective on key MIS issues by examining published MIS articles. A content analysis of MIS articles appearing between 1989 a nd mid-year 1993 in prominent academic and practitioner journals has b een conducted in order to: identify, classify, and prioritize by meta- categories the key issues in MIS publications; to perform a trend anal ysis of the various meta-categories; and to examine the relevance of i ssues by providing a comparison with the issues that emerged out of pr evious key issue studies. Twenty-six key issues are ranked according t o their frequency of occurrence as the topic of inquiry in the 630 art icles surveyed. Further, a year-by-year analysis of publications from 1989 to 1992 provides some visible trends. The study also reveals diff erences that exist between the issues that appeared as important in MI S publications and those that appeared significant to the top executiv es in key issue studies. Reasons for and implications of these differe nces are offered. (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd