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PurposeThis study applies D3.js and social network analysis (SNA) to examine the impact of collaboration patterns, research productivity patterns and publication patterns on the Ministry of Education (MOE) evaluation policies across all Management Information Systems (MIS) departments in Taiwan.Design/methodology/approachThis study first retrieved data from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan (MOST) website from 1982 to 2015, the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) website, the Web of Science (WOS) website and Google Scholar. Then it applied power-law degree distribution, cumulative distribution function, weighted contribution score, exponential weighted moving average and network centrality score to visualize the MIS collaborations and research patterns.FindingsThe analysis concluded that most MIS professors focused primarily on SCIE-/SSCI-/TSSCI-/core indexed journals after 2005. Professors from public universities were drawn to collaboration and publishing in high-quality-based journals, while professors from private universities focused more on quantity-based publications. Female professors, by contrast, have a slightly higher single-authorship publication rate in SCIE-/SSCI-/TSSCI-indexed journals than do male professors. Meanwhile, professors in northern Taiwan emphasized quantity-based journal publications, while a focus on quality was more typical in the south. Furthermore, National Cheng Kung University has the most single-authorship or intrauniversity publications in SCIE-/SSCI-/TSSCI-/core journals, and National Sun Yat-Sen University published more SSCI-indexed articles than SCIE-indexed articles. All of these findings show that there is an explicit relation between MOE evaluation policies and MIS faculty members' collaboration/publication strategies.Originality/valueThe above findings explain how MOE evaluation policies affected MIS faculty members' collaboration and publication strategies in Taiwan, and the authors hope that such findings can constitute a resource for understanding and characterizing networking with MIS departments in Taiwan.

Research productivity has been always an important part of every academic’s job, since it has a profound effect on faculty promotion and tenure decisions. In addition, some scholars believe that co-authorship between faculty members has a great impact on their academic life and faculty advancement. Since 2005, the Ministry of Education of Taiwan (MOE) has developed two university programs and evaluation policies for improving the competitiveness and internationalization of Taiwan universities, and has clearly stated that there is a strong relationship between faculty promotion and research performance. However, none of them has used social network analysis (SNA) to examine research productivity and co-authorship under two university programs and evaluation policies from MOE in Taiwan. Therefore, in this study, we first uses SNA to analyze the research productivity, collaboration patterns, and publication strategies of faculty members in a Management Information Systems (MIS) department at a national university in Taiwan. Then, we used D3, a well-known drawing tool to create data visualization using JavaScript libraries, to visualize and discuss how these two university programs and evaluation policies from the MOE affected these patterns and strategies. We hope that our study not only provides beneficial information to the MIS department, but can be treated as an important source for MOE committees in their future adjustment of university programs and policies.