Indigenous Knowledge in Information Systems Research

The purpose of this article is to develop a deeper understanding of how indigenous knowledge is considered in Information Systems (IS) research and to provide an integrative synthesis of the recent IS literature on this topic. We conducted a systematic review of 863 studies published across 481 IS journals, combining bibliometric techniques with Textual Data Analysis and following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) protocol. The main findings are threefold. First, the literature on indigenous knowledge in IS can be structured into four major research streams: (1) cultural-oriented, (2) local-oriented, (3) tacit-knowledge–oriented, and (4) tacit-explicit knowledge transfer-oriented studies. Second, building on these thematic streams, we propose a comprehensive synthesis of the IS literature on indigenous knowledge. Third, original results derived from a triangulated analysis of themes, abstracts, titles, keywords, and journal impact factors are presented and discussed.