The Seven Major Journals Reviewed

Communications of the ACM
Decision Sciences
Information & Management
Information Systems Research
Journal of MIS
MIS Quarterly
Management Science

Scanning the above journals provides a fairly comprehensive list of instruments using a practical amount of resources. This conclusion is based on our experience with CSQS (which looked at more than 35 IS-related journals over a 22 year time span). These journals accounted for more than 70% of all surveys with reasonable technical characteristics (Zmud and Boynton, 1991) in CSQS. This excluded the ICIS Proceedings which we felt were less likely to report new instrument development that would not ultimately appear in one of our "major 7". The next closest journal was The International Journal of Man-Machine Studies with 4% of the total number of rigorous surveys. Of course this review did not consider other valuable outlets in nonIS areas (such as the general area of organizations), but the few "hits" we have found in such journals while compiling CSQS did not make it practical to search them in this review.