Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline 2011

he academically peer refereed journal Informing Science endeavors to provide an understanding of the complexities in informing clientele. Fields from information systems, library science, journalism in all its forms to education all contribute to this science. These fields, which developed independently and have been researched in separate disciplines, are evolving to form a new transdiscipline, Informing Science. Informing Science publishes articles that provide insights into the nature, function and design of systems that inform clients. Authors may use epistemologies from engineering, computer science, education, psychology, business, anthropology, and such. The ideal paper will serve to inform fellow researchers, perhaps from other fields, of contributions to this area. What is Informing Science: an hour long introduction by Prof. T. Grandon Gill Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline is the principal channel for sharing knowledge about and encouraging interest in informing across a diverse body of researchers drawn from many disciplines and nations. The academically peer refereed journal Informing Science endeavors to provide an understanding of the complexities in informing clientele. Fields from information systems, library science, journalism in all its forms to education all contribute to this science. These fields, which developed independently and have been researched in separate disciplines, are evolving to form a new transdiscipline, Informing Science. Informing Science publishes articles that provide insights into the nature, function and design of systems that inform clients. Authors may use epistemologies from engineering, computer science, education, psychology, business, anthropology, and such. The ideal paper will serve to inform fellow researchers, perhaps from other fields, of contributions to this area. The transdisciplinary character of InformSciJ requires that we be willing to publish a broad array of contributions. In many of our client fields, most published research contributions can be characterized as either theory-building or theory-testing. While submissions of this type are, of course, encouraged, we will also consider a broader range of contributions, including: • Synthesis: An existing body of theory and observations are organized into a more cohesive whole. A literature review may fall into this category, but only if it attempts to propose a novel systematic organization for the existing literature. • Illustration: The meaning or implications of a particular theory are explained and clarified through an illustrative example. In the business literature, for example, nearly all practitioner-directed publications use this technique extensively. • Unexplained Observation: A rich observation, often having properties not well explained with existing theory, that is offered without serious attempt to incorporate it into theory. It is interesting to note that while research of the form “I observed this but I can’t explain it” would be nearly impossible to publish in any social science journal known to me, such anomalous observations often form the basis for scientific revolution (Kuhn, 1970)— such as the Michelson Morley experiment, which paved the way for Einstein’s special relativity.