Meta-analysis of design science research within the IS community: Trends, patterns, and outcomes

Abstract

The knowledge of design problem and solution is obtained in the building and application of an artifact, which is the end-goals of the design science research. Our objective in this paper is to conduct meta-analysis of the research being published by DESRIST to date to better understand the paradigm of design science research, and to sense the direction that research undertakings are headed. We present a meta-analysis model and detailed analysis of applications, IT artifact types, multi-disciplinary teams, and impact results. Our findings show that the majority of the papers are negatively skewed, systematically clustering more IT artifacts for IS development problem domain. The most cited papers clustered around those that featured better design theories. We concur that researchers need to equally focus on areas with less research including organization and market domains, as well as causal theories of design through a rigorous formative or summative evaluation of artifacts. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.