Introduction

This series of three volumes on research methodologies follows on from an earlier collection of two volumes we edited entitled Formulating Research Methods in Information Systems. The original plan was to put together from 20 years of contributions to the Journal of Information Technology (JIT) a single volume on research methods and practices. However, as we read our way through the JIT issues starting with the most recent, we were quite startled to discover a very rich vein indeed on this theme going back as far as 1990. It became quite impossible to entertain the idea of omitting so many great papers with so much to say. Instead we decided to produce a more comprehensive text that would be of service to information systems (IS) scholars, PhD researchers and students, both as a reference and also as a re-presentation of valuable work and knowledge that was highly relevant, but, unsystematized and un-themed, would likely be overlooked.Once we made this decision, the task then became to make a judicious selection that fulfilled these aims. Leaving many papers out was never going to be an easy process, but once we focused on the task, we were pleased to discover that we were more or less unanimous on which papers we needed, and how they should be classified.