Who Pays for Decision Support Systems Research?Review, Directions, and Issues

IS academics are under increasing pressure to apply for national competitive grants, internal university grants, and industry funding to support their research programs. This paper presents an investigation of the nature of DSS research funding through the analysis of 1,020 papers published in 14 high quality journals from 1990 to 2003. In the sample, 23.6% of DSS papers acknowledged grant support, 14.7% were supported by major competitive grants, and only 5.1% received industry grant support. This level of grant funding may be a major problem for the DSS field. Even more worrying is the finding that overall grant support is falling over time. The detailed analysis of DSS research funding shows what types of DSS are grant-funded, where the grantfunded papers are published, what paradigms and methods are grant-funded in DSS research, the relationship between research quality and funding type, and the relationship between grant funding and research relevance. The findings and conclusions relate to DSS research, but because of the proportion of IS research that concerns DSS, they are also important for IS research in general.