Selecting Research Topics: Personal Experiences and Speculations For the Future

In the rapidly changing field of information systems, every researcher faces important choices about what research topics to explore and how to pursue that research. This paper addresses these questions by summarizing a panel discussion at the 2001 Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) annual meeting. The first part of this paper provides a framework explaining factors that can be used in selecting research topics. Then we explain how our own past choices of research topics reflect the factors in the framework. In the final section, we use the framework to speculate about promising research topics for the future.