Key information systems issues: An analysis of MIS publications

Reports of key MIS issues based on the perceptions of senior IS executives appear periodically in the MIS literature. In this article, we provide another perspective on key MIS issues by examining published MIS articles. A content analysis of MIS articles appearing between 1989 and mid-year 1993 in prominent academic and practitioner journals has been conducted in order to: identify, classify, and prioritize by meta-categories the key issues in MIS publications; to perform a trend analysis of the various meta-categories; and to examine the relevance of issues by providing a comparison with the issues that emerged out of previous key issue studies. Twenty-six key issues are ranked according to their frequency of occurrence as the topic of inquiry in the 630 articles surveyed. Further, a year-by-year analysis of publications from 1989 to 1992 provides some visible trends. The study also reveals differences that exist between the issues that appeared as important in MIS publications and those that appeared significant to the top executives in key issue studies. Reasons for and implications of these differences are offered.