Abstract

This paper reports the preliminary results of a project that is investigating the theoretic foundations of decision support systems (DSS). The project is principally motivated by a concern for the direction and relevance of DSS research. The main areas of research focus are the decision and judgement theoretic base of the discipline, the research strategies used in published articles, and the professional relevance of DSS research. The project will analyse DSS articles published in 17 selected journals from 1990 to 2002. This preliminary report is based on the analysis of 358 papers. The findings indicate that DSS research is dominated by positivist research (in particular laboratory experiments and surveys), is heavily influenced by the work of Herbert Simon, and has a healthy balance of theory and application, but, it is poorly grounded in judgement and decision-making research, and falls down in the identification of the nature of clients and users.

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