Sistemas de Informação no Brasil: uma análise dos artigos científicos dos anos 90

An evaluation of the state of the art in the Information Systems domain, in Brazil, is presented in this article. The assessment was obtained by the analysis of 163 articles published between January 1990 and September 1997 in the most important scientific journals in Administration. The analysis was based on the classification of the subjects, developed in the articles, on the research strategies and methodologies adopted in the empirical researches and on the assessment of the scientific quality of the articles. The results showed that (1) there is a strong proportion of theoretical essays published (41% in the period 1990-7 and 34% in the period 1996-7), (2) the most important subjects studied by the authors are development and use of IS in Brazil, (3) qualitative research (cases studies) and survey are the more frequently adopted research methodologies (in 72% of the empirical studies), and (4) the scientific quality of the articles is low. Because the link between theory and the operationalization of the variables is not elicited, the methodological procedures are incompletely described, and the research instruments are not validated.