MIS faculty collaboration in research and journal publication

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.