The Ongoing Quest for the it Artifact: Looking Back, Moving Forward
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
More than 10 years ago, Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) examined the conceptualization of Information Technology (IT) in Information Systems Research (ISR) articles published in the 1990s. Their main conclusion was that the majority of these articles did not properly conceptualize the IT artifact. They recommended that IS researchers start to theorize about the IT artifact and employ rich conceptualizations of IT. The Orlikowski and Iacono paper provides a strong anchor point from which to analyze the evolution of the IS discipline. In order to obtain an up-to-date image of contemporary IS research, and to assess how the IS field has evolved since the 1990s, we carried out a similar analysis on a more recent and broader set of articles, that is, the full set (N = 644) of papers published between 2006 and 2009 by six top North American (ISR, MISQ, JAIS) and European (JIT, ISJ, EJIS) journals. The statistics in our results reveal no drastic advance in terms of deeper engagement with the IT artifact; more than 39% of the articles in our set are virtually mute about the artifact, and less than 16% employ an ensemble view of IT. Moreover, we note differences among the North American and European journals. Implications of the findings for two perspectives central to the IS research legitimacy debate are discussed.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it