In how many highly rated journal articles do
Information Systems research faculty publish to earn tenure? Which
journals are highly rated outlets? Tenure candidates, promotion and
tenure committees, and those who are asked to write external letters
are frequently called upon to answer such questions. When Dennis et
al. (2006) examined all IS Ph.D. graduates entering academic
careers, few faculty had published enough articles in 20 "elite"
journals in six years to meet tenure research expectations at
research-intensive schools. Our study builds on the dialog started
by Dennis et al. In our study, we counted the number of journal
articles at the point of tenure of faculty who earned tenure within
five to seven years after their Ph.D. graduation date. We also
examined the effect of acknowledging different sets of journals as
highly rated on the publication rates of faculty who earned tenure.
Specifically, we examined the effects of expanding on Dennis et al.
by including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research,
Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of the
AIS, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of
Information Systems, Journal of Information Technology,
and Journal of Strategic Information Systems in the journal
basket. We also looked at the effect of acknowledging highly rated
non-IS business journals and highly rated computer science and
engineering journals. Finally, we present journal publication
benchmarks based on these findings for different types of research
institutions.
Keywords: Tenure standards, publication standards,
publication benchmarks, faculty productivity, scientometrics,
Carnegie Classification