A study of ACIS proceedings during its 18-year history has the potential to reveal a good deal about research in Australian (and New Zealand) universities. To this end, the author of this chapter has initiated an archival analysis of ACIS proceedings. To date, the papers from the first 16 ACIS events have been converted to electronic format and salient data from each of the papers have been captured in an EndNote database. A database that is more conducive to data analysis is being built.

Though analyses of the ACIS archival material are in progress, we are able to report some preliminary findings. Counts reported here were done using ‘Search References’ in EndNote and are for the years 1990–2005. More reliable counts will be available once the data are loaded into the intended database.

All papers have been classified using the classification options:

The papers have also been coded according to topic. This coding is preliminary, and it is our intention that the codes be confirmed by the authors of papers. A 32-topic coding scheme was used based on Barki et al. (1993) and Palvia et al. (2004). The choice of the coding scheme was intended to facilitate the comparison of topics covered at ACIS with those covered in IS research topic studies elsewhere.

In the years 1990–95, about 30 per cent of the papers were classified as technical while in the years 2000–05 only 12 per cent were classified this way. In the years 2000–05, the percentage of papers that were coded as ‘organisational environment’ or ‘external environment’ was approximately double that of the years 1990–95. These changes support the premise that research in IS has been moving away from a more technical emphasis in the early years and is now placing more importance on context.

There has been no real pattern to the inclusion of curriculum-related topics. Most commonly, 7–8 per cent of papers are curriculum related. The first five years of the conference include the years with the highest and the lowest percentages of such papers. At the First Annual Conference on Information Systems, three of the 15 papers (20 per cent) were curriculum related; in 1994, there were no curriculum-related papers.

As new technologies have developed, new topics have emerged, interest in other topics has fallen away and previously discussed topics have taken on a new focus. For example, in recent years research into electronic commerce/inter-organisational systems has peaked, research interest in databases/DBMS has waned somewhat and there are new stirrings of interest in hardware due mainly to research into mobile devices such as PDAs.

The most popular topics have been:

The universities that have contributed most papers (as of 2005) are:

While the majority of ACIS papers were from Australian and New Zealand authors, there was a significant presence of authors from countries elsewhere in the world. The non-Australasian countries that have contributed the most papers between 1990 and 2005 (using first-author country affiliation) are (the number of papers from each country is in parentheses):