This paper does exactly what the title suggests. To believe in this paper, you have to believe in the abstract concept of a field that is not defined in the paper; I don’t. Even the particular fields, library and information science (LIS) and management information systems (MIS), are curiously defined. The authors state that they are using methodological triangulation that “involves using two or more methodological approaches focused on the same output.” In fact, they don’t quite do that, for good reasons. To define LIS, they triangulated between two sets of data: citation data and a perception-based ranking. To define MIS, they relied on someone else’s triangulation between nine different sets of such data. Hence, there are overlaps that they resolve manually. Appendix A provides the journals--it seems plausible to me.

The headline answer to the question is that four percent of MIS articles cite LIS articles, while the converse figure is 18 percent. From here, the authors take a leap of faith without hesitation, concluding that “the MIS impact on LIS was far greater, as demonstrated by the large discrepancy between knowledge exported to and imported from LIS.”

Then, the paper does field cocitation, a logical, but apparently new, extension of author cocitation, to look at the papers that cited both fields. The winner turns out to be Springer’s “Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)” series, which accounts for 1/16th--or 1/11th if one includes the “Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence (LNAI)” subseries--of what was not categorized as either MIS or LIS.

The paper then uses cocitation data to produce a proximity map between the various journals; the authors discuss the methodology used and the questions around it:“This revealed a core cluster of LIS journals. The MIS journals, by contrast, were split between two main groups and three singletons, resulting in looser clusters on the MIS side.”

The authors draw several conclusions, the last of which is: “The results of this research demonstrated that a field cocitation analysis of any two fields should result in a clustering of journals within each field and identification of boundary-spanning journals.”

Since human beings like to think in terms of fields, whether or not they actually exist, this may indeed prove to be a useful contribution.