15 Years of Information System Design Science Research: A Bibliographic Analysis

The publication of the seminal work of Hevner et al. [34] generated a noticeable shift on the part of researchers, leading to greater interaction between research and practice, in particular through the development of Information Systems Design Science Research (ISDSR). Fifteen years later, the time appears ripe for a retrospective analysis of this research paradigm in order to understand the logic and dynamics of its development. Recently, a small number of researchers have attempted to provide such an analysis through literature syntheses based on their subjective interpretation of the field. We seek to pursue this effort through a Co-Citation Analysis of ISDSR articles published in the AIS basket of eight journals. As such, we offer an original analysis of the ISDSR literature that sheds light on its intellectual foundations. Our contribution is twofold. First, we show the distribution of ISDSR articles and the composition of the intellectual core. Second, we discuss our quantitative results and identify an integrative framework for ISDSR.