IS Journals and How the Publishing Game Actually Works

When I started my PhD, I had a vague idea that publishing meant writing a paper, submitting it, and waiting for feedback. I did not understand that the waiting alone could take most of a year, that "revise and resubmit" is considered good news, or that a paper accepted today might have been first submitted three years ago. Nobody told me this was normal. I had to figure it out by watching.

The AIS Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals is the list that defines top-tier IS publication venues. Eight journals: MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of MIS, Information Systems Journal, European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, and Decision Sciences. This list was formalized in the mid-2000s and quickly became the benchmark for hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions across research universities. Campbell-Meier, Sylvester, and Woods (2019) documented how the basket created a self-reinforcing citation pattern, where journals on the list cite each other more and more over time. The list shapes the field's internal economy of prestige.

Getting a paper into one of these venues is the difference between a tenurable record and one that is not, at most research universities. I say this not to be dramatic but because it is factually how tenure decisions work in IS. A department's own definition of "good research" usually maps onto "published in basket journals" with very little room for deviation. If you have two publications in non-basket IS journals and your colleague has one in MIS Quarterly, your colleague is doing better by the metrics that matter most in hiring season.

The review process at basket journals is double-blind at most of them. Authors do not know who is reviewing their work, and reviewers nominally do not know who wrote it. In practice, reviewers frequently can identify authors from writing style, reference patterns, or the specific research stream the paper extends. This is an open secret. The double-blind norm persists because it provides a structural check on obvious favoritism even if it does not eliminate all recognition.

Getting past desk rejection is the first filter, and it removes a substantial fraction of submissions. Editors reject papers without sending them to reviewers when the paper does not fit the journal's scope, is not at the level the journal expects, or has obvious problems that reviewers would flag immediately. ISJ editors Davison, Karanasios, and Chatterjee (2024) wrote explicitly about this, noting that an increasing share of submitted manuscripts fail the basic test of having a clear IS element. If you submit to MIS Quarterly with a paper that happens to involve a software tool but does not engage with IS theory or IS phenomena in a substantive way, you will get a desk rejection fast. This is actually efficient, because it saves your time too, even though it does not feel that way when it happens.

If your paper passes desk review and goes out for review, you typically get two to four reviewers and an associate editor who coordinates. The review process from submission to decision takes three to six months at most journals on a good cycle. If the decision is "revise and resubmit," you write a detailed response letter addressing every reviewer concern, revise the paper, and resubmit. The next round takes another three to six months. Papers that eventually get published often go through two to four rounds of revision at a single journal before a final decision. A paper can cycle through this process for two or three years at one journal, get rejected at the end, and then go through the whole thing again somewhere else.

The practical implication is that a paper published today might represent five or six years of work from the first draft. And the paper that appears in the journal may be substantially different from what was first submitted. The revision process is not cosmetic. Reviewers at basket journals often require new data collection, new theoretical grounding, additional analysis, or fundamental restructuring. Responding to that seriously takes months. The authors who succeed in this environment are the ones who treat reviewer feedback as real intellectual work to engage with, not as bureaucratic obstacles to overcome.

What makes a "good" IS paper is genuinely contested across journals and reviewers. Different journals weight things differently. Information Systems Research has historically been more open to formal and mathematical approaches. Information Systems Journal actively encourages interpretive and qualitative work. MIS Quarterly has a reputation for demanding very high methodological standards regardless of paradigm. Decision Sciences, which is in the basket, covers a broader scope including operations and quantitative methods, so IS papers compete with work from adjacent fields. A paper that is a strong fit for one of these eight venues might genuinely not fit another, which is why journal selection matters.

Gartner produces research on completely different timescales and for completely different purposes. Their newsroom (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom) reports findings on weeks-long cycles, designed to support near-term organizational decisions. The difference is not that Gartner is less rigorous in some abstract sense. It is that rigorous academic research optimizes for slow, careful accumulation of knowledge that can withstand years of scrutiny. Gartner optimizes for decision support that is useful now, for the specific question a CIO or board is asking today. These are genuinely different activities. The problem is when people in organizations expect academic IS research to serve the same function as a Gartner brief, or when academic IS researchers dismiss practitioner research as not real. Both misunderstand what the other is doing.

The thing that surprised me most when I started paying attention to this is how much the publishing process itself shapes what IS research looks like. Papers that are hard to evaluate get rejected, and papers are easiest to evaluate when they follow established methodological conventions and extend recognized theoretical frameworks. The result is a literature that is methodologically conservative and theoretically incremental. Individual reviewers might be open to novelty, but the multi-reviewer, multi-round process tends to sand off the parts of a paper that are most unusual. Understanding this does not mean accepting it uncritically. But for a PhD student trying to build a record, it is important to know what game you are playing before you try to change it.