Reflecting the Past Decades of ICIS, ECIS and AMCIS Proceedings - A Design Science Perspective

The methodological pluralism in IS research is topic of an ongoing discussion. Several claims have been made both in favor of methodological pluralism and against it. The debate focuses mainly the relationship between IS research methods (i.e. empirical/behavioural or constructional orientation) and the underlying IS research paradigms, especially positivism and interpretivism. As an integrative discipline Information System (IS) research has a multi-disciplinary and multinational focus per definition. Further investigating that methodical pluralism we want to investigate how the methodical discussion effected the development of Design Science Research in the last decade. Therefore, we conducted a literature analysis of the proceedings of the three major IS conferences over the last decade. Our analysis of more than 7500 articles showed that the Design Science Research agenda indeed differs from the common IS research agenda in respect to the use of methods and seems to be more open for a multi-methodological research approach.