Leveraging Context: Re-Thinking Research Processes to Make “Contributions to Theory”

The ever-changing technology landscape has information systems (IS) researchers constantly facing new phenomena, especially in new settings, that must be understood. To address this challenge, building on calls for contextualization, this commentary complements prior works on contextualization and presents guidance within four general research steps—defining the problem, anchoring to prior research, seeking novelty, and reporting practices—in order to achieve rigorous contextualization. In doing this, the basic idea of scientific contribution in IS research is expanded from (a) the typical contribution of theory to the phenomenon (more than 80% of IS research articles from 2018 to 2021 from Information Systems Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and MIS Quarterly) to (b) include the less common contribution to theory, especially reference discipline theory, thus creating the opportunity for IS research to be more impactful and IS to grow as a reference discipline. Finally, guidelines for editors and reviewers are offered to facilitate the publication of impactful contextualized research.

History: Yulin Fang, Senior Editor; Huigang Liang, Associate Editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0048.