Informing science is a transdiscipline that was established to promote the study of informing processes across a diverse set of academic disciplines, including management information systems, education, business, instructional technology, computer science, communications, psychology, philosophy, library science, information science and many others. Its principal unit of analysis is the informing system, a collection of informers, clients, and channels that has been designed or has evolved to serve a particular informing need. The organization created to advance the informing science transdiscipline is the Informing Science Institute (ISI), whose founder, Eli Cohen, proposed the need for the field in his article "Reconceptualizing Information Systems as a Field of the Transdiscipline Informing Science: From Ugly Duckling to Swan" (Cohen, 1999). The ISI presently hosts an annual conference (Informing Science & Information Technology Education (InSITE)), publishes thirteen academic journals, and—through its Informing Science Press—has published dozens of books. Both its journals and books are open access at no cost online, as well as being available for purchase in print form.
Informing science came into being as a transdiscipline around 1998. During that year, two key events occurred. The seminal article that defined the field (Cohen, 1999) was accepted for publication and the field's flagship journal--Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline—was launched.
The theme of Cohen's (1999) article was relatively simple, and resonated with many in the global academic community. In brief, he argued that many different disciplines are studying the same types of issues: teaching programming, communicating effectively, designing systems to provide information to clients, and so forth, as illustrated in Table 1. This situation was not only inefficient from a research standpoint, but it also tended to promote research silos in which researchers from one discipline were unable to benefit from the research of colleagues in other disciplines. In the long run, he asserted that such a situation would be highly deleterious to our overall understanding of these processes. He expressed particular concern with the situation in his own research discipline, management information systems, which was already becoming fragmented and increasingly irrelevant to practice.
Informing Discipline | Client to be Informed |
Information Systems | Workers in a Firm, Managers |
Information Science | Library patron |
Journalism | Reader/Viewer/Listener |
Public Relations | Public |
Secretarial/Office Systems | Office Workers |
What Cohen proposed as an antidote to this situation was the establishment of an interdisciplinary community of researchers described as follows:
During its earliest years, the informing science discipline was particularly focused on issues related to management information systems and information/library science—the fields from which many of its researchers originated. Over time, however, instructional technology became an important area of research, leading to the establishment of additional journals in the informing science in the education and instructional technology areas. In recent years, an effort has been made to further broaden the field. In 2009, the collection Foundations of Informing Science (Gill & Cohen, 2009) was published, including both seminal articles from its journals and new contributions. The collection included chapters related to economics, decision theory, political science, education, design, complexity science, and mining. Currently, the informing science field is encouraging interest in research that is not necessarily related to technology. In a keynote address given at InSITE 2011 by T. Grandon Gill, the editor-in-chief of the journal Informing Science, proposed that the field could be described as follows:
In that same address, a number of areas meriting additional research were proposed. These included:
The basic unit of analysis for informing science is the informing system. According to the original Cohen (1999) article, such systems consist of three components: an informing environment, a delivery system and a task completion system, as shown in Figure 1:
The delivery system represented the combination of technological and non-technological elements that comprised the communications channel. The informing environment represented the system components of the system on the informer's (sender's) side. The task completion system involved the components of the system related to the client (user, receiver) of the information. This particular conception, illustrated in Figure 2, allowed the model map well to Shannon's communication model.
While the basic model did, and still does, serve as a useful unit of analysis, it was pointed out that "real world" informing systems come in many topologies, as illustrated in Figure 3.
Among the variations of systems listed are the following (Gill & Bhattacherjee, 2007, p. 19):
Given the field's origins in management information systems (MIS) research, it is not unexpected that early investigations into, and conceptualizations of, the development of informing systems tended to rely heavily on technology-based experienced. Cohen (1999), for example, viewed informing systems as having three levels:
As examples, he proposed (Cohen, 1999, p. 217):
As illustrated in Figure 4, Gill and Bhattacherjee (2007) further expanded the concept with the example of academic informing systems, which can be described in terms of two related informing systems that share many of the same clients. The disciplinary system represents the research field with which faculty members and departments are aligned. The institutional system represents the activities of the college or university, primarily focused on informing student clients. In subsequent publications (e.g., Gill, 2009a), informing science researchers have also begun to address the issue of how such systems can evolve, as opposed to being a pure product of design. The importance of understanding these informal processes for informing system development—even for IT-based systems—has been underscored by the rapid acceptance of technologies such as social media. There is little question that users have adapted these technologies for their own informing purposes in ways far beyond those anticipated by the original designers of the systems.
In informing science, the term transdiscipline refers to the idea that a common problem—in this case the challenges presented by informing--may benefit from the diversity of insights and perspectives offered by multiple disciplines, sometimes referred to as the component disciplines or client disciplines of informing science. To foster such a collaboration among researchers, however, requires extending the notion of what constitutes "research". It has also led to the development of a number of parallel research streams.
In an open letter to the informing science community describing the types of research appropriate for the field, the Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline T. Grandon Gill made the following statement (Gill, 2009b, p. vi):
As a consequence of this expanded view of research, the journals and conferences sponsored by the ISI cover a very broad array of topics, research methods and styles of presentation.
Although much of the research in informing science does not fit within simple categories, there have been a number of themes that have captured the particular interest of researchers in the field. These include:
Consistent with its roots in the MIS and education client disciplines, many articles published in Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline represent the types of research that might also be publishable within the client disciplines themselves. By 2010, however, the editorial policy had evolved. The Editor-in-Chief of the journal commented on the current state of policy in the following statement (Gill, 2010, p. v):
As a consequence of the gradual adoption of this policy, recent volumes of the journal have become both slimmer and size and more directly focused on the journal's mission.
The principal organizing body for the informing science transdiscipline is the Informing Science Institute (ISI). According to a recent article (Murphy, in press):
In that same article, the ISI's activities are described in informing system terms. These are illustrated in Figure 5. The ISI engages in a broad range of informing activities in support of the informing science transdiscipline. These include journal publications, organizing conferences, publishing books and offering services to members.
The ISI currently publishes thirteen journals, though two of these journals now function as passive repositories. Three of its journals are published in collaboration with other institutions. See Table 2 for a list of journals currently published solely by the ISI. These journals cover several common themes that have been established by the ISI. These include:
Title | Specialization/Mission | Authors through 2019 | Articles through 2019 | Institutions through 2019 | Year Founded |
1. Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline | The flagship journal of the ISI, focusing on theory and practice of informing | 447 | 596 | 153 | 1998 |
2. Journal of Information Technology Education: Research | Serves the informational technology education audience on research-based issues | 845 | 978 | 328 | 2002 |
3. Journal of Information Technology Education: Innovations in Practice | Serves the informational technology education audience on issues in innovations in practice | 324 | 141 | 167 | 2002 |
4. Journal for the Study of Postsecondary and Tertiary Education | Considers issues in the advancement of higher and postsecondary education | 115 | 141 | 76 | 2016 |
5.Interdisciplinary Journal of E-Skills and Lifelong Learning | Considers instructional technology issues of informing | 433 | 619 | 162 | 2005 |
6. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management | Considers information and technology in organizations | 402 | 479 | 212 | 2006 |
7. International Journal of Doctoral Studies | Considers issues with informing doctoral students | 510 | 610 | 256 | 2006 |
8. Issues in Informing Science and Information Technology Journal | Covers IT in all other disciplines | 821 | 1294 | 250 | 2004 |
The Informing Science Institute also includes two journals that now function as passive repositories: Informing Faculty and Journal of Information Technology: Discussion Cases (JITE:DC). Informing Faculty is a repository for discussion cases pertaining to challenges faced by faculty and administrators in higher education. JITE:DC is a repository for discussion cases in which information technology plays a key role in decision-making challenges (Murphy, in press).
Additionally, the Informing Science Institute publishes three partner journals in collaboration with other institutions.
These are Muma Case Review, Muma Business Review, and International Journal of Community Development and Management Studies. Partner journals agree to abide by the ISI's high standards for the treatment of authors and reviewers, but handle their own paper formatting and printing.
The ISI family of journals is also somewhat unusual for a U.S.-head quartered research publication in that a large percentage of its journals' editors and authors are situated outside of the United States. As shown in Figure 6, only about a third of its authors have been affiliated with U.S. academic institutions.
One of the principal vehicles through which ISI informs its membership is through its Informing Science and IT Education conferences, held at a different location during June of every year since 2001. Attendance is typically around 150 participants. Conferences to date have been located as follows (Informing Science Institute, 2020):
Past conferences have included four primary tracks (Murphy, 2011, p. 117-118):
ISI has instituted a "fast track" process for article submissions to InSITE conferences. After all conference submissions have been reviewed, the editor-in-chiefs of ISI's seven journals identify articles that are of particularly high quality and are also a good fit with the journal's mission. Authors of these articles are then offered the opportunity to revise their submission for publication in the journal rather than in the conference proceedings.
The Informing Science Press is the publishing arm of the ISI and has published over 50 books, which are all available online for free on Google Books and are also available for purchase. Its catalog of books encompasses a wide range of subjects.
Topics covered by books published by the ISI press include, but are not limited to:
Table 3 shows a list of topics on which books were published from the inception of the Informing Science Press through 2009.
Book Subject | Number |
Education | 15 |
e-learning | 13 |
Informing Theory | 12 |
Applied IS/IT | 11 |
Knowledge Objects | 6 |
Knowledge Management | 4 |
Multimedia | 3 |
Internationalization | 1 |
Open-Source |
The content is sourced from: https://handwiki.org/wiki/Informing_science