A profile of information systems research published in expert systems with applications from 1995 to 2008

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Abstract

Expert systems with applications (ESWA) has been regarded as one of the highly qualified journals in the information system. This paper profiles research published in ESWA from 1995 to 2008. Based on the multidimensional analysis, we identified the most productive author and universities, research paper numbers per geographic region, and the most employed issues and methodologies used by the most highly published authors. Our results indicate that (1) ESWA is clearly an internationalized journal, (2) the most employed methodologies are fuzzy ESs and knowledge-based systems, and (3) the leading highly published authors always have diverse methodologies and applications. Furthermore, the implications for researchers, journal editors, universities, and research institution are presented.

Introduction

Expert system is a kind of information system, a subfield of artificial intelligence, and a software that is used to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts. The simulation of performance of the expert is to help human workers solve real world problems by expertise, a specific domain of knowledge. There are diverse problems which need to be solved in the real world. Thus, the use of expert system becomes prolific in many fields (Liao, 2005). ESWA is regarded as one of the distinguished international journals which focus on expert and intelligent systems applied to real world problems globally. As a journal of expert and intelligent systems, it addresses many problems, methods, and performance. Therefore, it is useful for IS researchers to examine the major research issues in expert and intelligent systems and their trends in order to continuously progress the research.

This paper profiles the types of research that have been published in ESWA from 1995 to 2008. The overview of research published in the journal provides a broader understanding of IS for authors, reviewers, and journal editors, universities, and research institutions (Avison, Dwivedi, Fitzgerald & Powell, 2008). It is worthwhile to classify, categorize, and profile this paper into various dimensions, such as research issue (Alavi and Carlson, 1992, Claver et al., 2000, Culnan and Swanson, 1986, Farhoomand and Drury, 1999, Vessey et al., 2002), research methodology (Chen and Hirschheim, 2004, Grover et al., 1993, Ives et al., 1980, Palvia, 2004, Palvia et al., 2003), productive authors and university (Athey and Plotnicki, 2000, Im et al., 1998, Nath and Jackson, 1991), because the results could provide some frequently called for guidelines and suggestions on how to publish in highly rated journals. Thus, this paper analyzes publication trends in ESWA to realize those objectives as follows:

  • 1.

    To identify the most productive authors.

  • 2.

    To identify the universities associated with the most research publications.

  • 3.

    To identify the research impact of the most productive authors and geographic location based on the AIS classification.

  • 4.

    To determine the issues and methodologies most investigated and analyze their trends.

  • 5.

    To discuss the issues and methodologies of the most productive authors.

To achieve these objectives, a systematic and comprehensive review is needed. This review is constructed as follows. The next section describes the research methodology used in this paper. The third section presents the results of data analysis. The final section is the conclusion and implications of this research.

Section snippets

Research method

Expert system with applications published their first issue in 1990 and had full online information from this journal and was opened to general users in 1995. Thus this paper surveys the development of ESWA from 1995 to 2008. To focus on research articles, we follow Gallivan and Benbunan-Fich’s suggestions to exclude editorials, guest editorials and book reviews from the analysis (Gallivan & Benbunan-Fich, 2007). Research articles between 1995 and 2008 totaled 1836 articles.

For a detailed

Productive authors

For assessing research productivity, an analysis is made of the authors who have published the most during the period 1995–2008 in the expert system with applications. All publications naming the researcher are counted equally (Palvia et al., 2007, Yogesh and Jasna, 2008). For example, an article with two co-authors would provide one count for each. This approach results in the combined count of all authors being greater than the total number of articles. The findings of this study only include

Conclusions and implications

It is important for any field or any journal to do self-introspection in order to realize what happened inside of a journal or a field. This paper profiles the researches that have been published in ESWA from 1995 to 2008. Some interesting results emerge by analyzing the data during the period.

First, ESWA is really an internationalized journal from the viewpoint of geography. There are no significant differences in the number of publications between the three regions before the year 2001. After

References (18)

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