Let's say we are unethical people, trying to get ahead in academia and gain accolades for the sake of promotion and income and so forth. In an age where artificial intelligence and LLMs are entering the academic enterprise, has "cheating" changed? Are there new ways of fabricating, fudging, cooking, trimming, and lying about your data, your insights, and your writing? Do we cheat the way we've always cheated, just more effectively and efficiently? Or do we not actually cheat but merely change the rules and norms of scholarship? Tune in and find out.

References

Noblit, G. W., & Hare, R. D. (1988). Meta-Ethnography: Synthesising Qualitative Studies. Sage.

Locke, K. D., & Golden-Biddle, K. (1997). Constructing Opportunities for Contribution: Structuring Intertextual Coherence and "Problematizing" in Organizational Studies. Academy of Management Journal, 40(5), 1023–1062.

Recker, J. (2026). The Only Constant is Change: CAIS and the Ever-Evolving World of IS Research and Practice. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 57, forthcoming.

Shu, L. L., Mazar, N., Gino, F., Ariely, D., & Bazerman, M. H. (2012). RETRACTED: Signing at the Beginning Makes Ethics Salient and Decreases Dishonest Self-Reports in Comparison to Signing at the End. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109(38), 15197–15200.

Wikipedia. (2025). Ulrich Lichtenthaler. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Lichtenthaler.

Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing After the Results are Known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 196–217.

Andrade, C. (2021). HARKing, Cherry-Picking, P-Hacking, Fishing Expeditions, and Data Dredging and Mining as Questionable Research Practices. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 82(1), 20f13804.

von Briel, F., Davidsson, P., & Recker, J. (2026). Why and How Societal Crises Give Rise to Extreme Growth Outliers: A Theory of External Enablement. Academy of Management Review, https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2023.0072.

Brodeur, A., Carrell, S., Figlio, D., & Lusher, L. (2023). Unpacking P-hacking and Publication Bias. American Economic Review, 113(11), 2974–3002.

Dubner, S. J. (2026). If You're Not Cheating, You're Not Trying. Freakonomics Radio, Episode 662, https://freakonomics.com/podcast/if-youre-not-cheating-youre-not-trying/.

In 2026, everything is different. AI is scaling both research and publishing productivity. Impact factors no longer matter. Big name journal publishers launch offspring journals with little credentials other than the brand. How should we make sense of all this to figure out which journals are really important to our field? It is time for a new, rigorous ranking of IS journals. Problem is, we cannot really agree on our ranks and our reasons. You need to help us: give us your top ten ranking of IS journals with your reasoning. Together, we can find out what is best for our field going forward.

References

Seidel, S., Berente, N., Guo, H., Oh, W. (2026): Ethics, Regulation, and Policy: The Challenge to Institutions in the Digital Age. MIS Quarterly Special Issue, https://misq.umn.edu/pages/call_for_papers_ethics_and_regulations.

Saunders, C., Brown, S. A., Bygstad, B., Dennis, A. R., Ferran, C., Galletta, D. F., Liang, T.-P., Lowry, P. B., Recker, J., & Sarker, S. (2017). Goals, Values, and Expectations of the AIS Family of Journals. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 18(9), 633–647.

Riemer, K., Peter, S., Schwabe, G., Chatterjee, S., Adam, M., & Davison, R. M. (2026). Generative AI is Neither Just Another IT Artifact Nor a Colleague: Methodological Guidance for IS Scholarship. Information Systems Journal, 36(2), https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.70027.

Rai, A. (2016). Editor's Comments: The MIS Quarterly Trifecta: Impact, Range, Speed. MIS Quarterly, 40(1), iii–x.

Berente, N., Seidel, S., & Safadi, H. (2019). Data-Driven Computationally-Intensive Theory Development. Information Systems Research, 30(1), 50–64.

Recker, J. (2026). The Only Constant is Change: CAIS and the Ever-Evolving World of IS Research and Practice. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 57, forthcoming.

Watson, H. J. (2009). Tutorial: Business Intelligence - Past, Present, and Future. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 25(39), 487–510.

Loeser, F., Recker, J., vom Brocke, J., Molla, A., & Zarnekow, R. (2017). How IT Executives Create Organizational Benefits by Translating Environmental Strategies into Green IS Initiatives. Information Systems Journal, 27(4), 503–553.

Chau, M., Saunders, C., Chin, W., Recker, J., & Schwarz, A. (2025). 2025 Senior Scholars Journal Review Quality Survey. Association for Information Systems, https://aisnet.org/page/2025SeniorScholarSurvey.

As usual in the final episode of the year, we hand out three awards for what we think are some of the finest pieces of information systems scholarship produced this year. Except that this time, we are live at the International Conference on Information Systems in Nashville, Tennessee, in a room packed with our listeners. While this means the quality of the audio of our recording is not so great, the quality of the papers we honor this year is. And with a room full of laughter celebrating great information systems scholarship, we end the year on a high note. Congratulations to Stefan, Christoph, and Jan for winning the Trailblazing Research Award, John and Prasanna for winning the Elegant Scholarship Award, and Yanzhen, Huaxia and Andrew for winning the Innovative Method Award 2025.

References

Lowry, M. R. L., Vance, A., & Vance, M. D. (2025). Inexpert Supervision: Field Evidence on Boards' Oversight of Cybersecurity. Management Science, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.04147.

Porra, J., Hirschheim, R., Land, F., & Lyytinen, K. (2025). Seventy Years of Information Systems Development Methodologies from Early Business Computing to the Agile Era: A Two-part History. Part 1: From Pre to Early ISD Methodology Era: The Emergence of ISD Methodologies and Their Golden Era (1880–1980). Journal of Information Technology, 40(4), 441-469.

Porra, J., Hirschheim, R., Land, F., & Lyytinen, K. (2025). Seventy Years of Information Systems Development Methodologies from Early Business Computing to the Agile Era: A Two-part History. Part 2: Later ISD to Early Post ISD Methodology Era: Adapting to Accelerated Context Expansion (1980–today). Journal of Information Technology, 40(4), 470-498.

Abbasi, A., Somanchi, S., & Kelley, K. (2025). The Critical Challenge of using Large-scale Digital Experiment Platforms for Scientific Discovery. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 1-28.

Storey, V. C., Baskerville, R. L., & Kaul, M. (2025). Reliability in Design Science Research. Information Systems Journal, 35(3), 984-1014.

Larsen, K. R., Lukyanenko, R., Mueller, R. M., Storey, V. C., Parsons, J., VanderMeer, D. E., & Hovorka, D. S. (2025). Validity in Design Science. MIS Quarterly, 49(4), 1267-1294.

Vance, A., Eargle, D., Kirwan, C. B., Anderson, B. B., & Jenkins, J. L. (2025). The Fog of Warnings: How Non-Security-Related Notifications Diminish the Efficacy of Security Warnings. MIS Quarterly, 49(4), 1357–1384.

Baiyere, A., Bauer, J. M., Constantiou, I., & Hardt, D. (2025). Fake News and True News Assessment: The Persuasive Effect of Discursive Evidence in Judging Veracity. MIS Quarterly, 49(3), 823-860.

Seidel, S., Frick, C. J., & vom Brocke, J. (2025). Regulating Emerging Technologies: Prospective Sensemaking through Abstraction and Elaboration. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 179-204.

Burton-Jones, A., Boh, W., Oborn, E., & Padmanabhan, B. (2021). Advancing Research Transparency at MIS Quarterly: A Pluralistic Approach. MIS Quarterly, 45(2), iii-xviii.

Horton, J. J., & Tambe, P. (2025). The Death of a Technical Skill. Information Systems Research, 36(3), 1799-1820.

Chen, Y., Rui, H., & Whinston, A. B. (2025). Conversation Analytics: Can Machines Read Between the Lines in Real-Time Strategic Conversations? Information Systems Research, 36(1), 440-455.

Grisold, T., Berente, N., & Seidel, S. (2025). Guardrails for Human-AI Ecologies: A Design Theory for Managing Norm-Based Coordination. MIS Quarterly, 49(4), 1239-1266.

Clark, A. (2015). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. Oxford University Press.

Recker, J. (2021). Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide (2nd ed.). Springer.

Hirschheim, R., & Klein, H. K. (2012). A Glorious and Not-So-Short History of the Information Systems Field. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 13(4), 188-235.