Research Commentary

Research Commentaries are designed to provide a critical evaluation and roadmap for future research on an important information systems phenomenon. Key questions in evaluating the research commentary include:

1. Does the paper highlight an important and under-recognized phenomenon or perspective?
2. Does the article provide a critical, accurate, and insightful critique of the literature to date?
3. Does the article provide insightful directions for future research?
4. Will future researchers benefit from the ideas in the paper?
5. Are the prescriptions compelling, insightful and actionable?

The purpose of a Research Commentary is to describe an interesting or novel perspective or phenomenon, explain why this perspective is needed, and how it is missing in the current research and thinking, and describe directions for further research and practice. For example, authors could highlight attention to an emerging or a less-understood phenomenon, by describing it, describing its important elements, and proposing directions for research on this phenomenon.

The commentary should provide a perspective about how and why attention to this phenomenon is warranted, what are the interesting research questions, and how researchers should develop engage on these questions (any particular theories or methodologies?). Commentaries could be educational, provocative, or direction-setting. Though extensive literature reviews are not needed, the authors must provide some anchors to the existing literature to point out how current research is ignoring the phenomenon.