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G.J. de Vreede's Research Publications, Citations Ranked Among the Top in the Nation

By Keith Morelli

Gert Jan De VreedeAl Hevner

TAMPA -- Two University of South Florida Muma College of Business professors remain high on a list that measures research productivity and citations of a professor's published work.

Gert-Jan de Vreede, who was named the top management information systems scholar from USF, and Alan Hevner, de Vreede's colleague in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department, both made the list compiled by the University of Arizona.

The list was a ranking of academics' publishing productivity, combined with the times their work was citied in other research. The rating is the h-index, which measures how influential a researcher's work is within the scientific community.

To make the list, researchers must have earned at least a 20 ranking on the h-index. The list includes about 400 senior scholars.

"It was a pleasant surprise to find myself among many of my colleagues who have inspired me," de Vreede said. "The h-index provides a rewarding challenge to publish relevant and scientifically impactful research as it gets progressively harder to get a higher score."

De Vreede scored 40 on the h-index and Hevner, 36. Both are the highest ranking MIS researchers from USF on the list, which collects data from the beginning days of MIS publications.

"Although there are many different yardsticks for measuring research productivity in management information systems," said the University of Arizona website announcing the ranking, "the h-index is a metric that deserves attention due to its academic basis, simplicity and wide acceptance in other major scientific disciplines."

The h-index was suggested by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality.

A professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department at the Muma College of Business, de Vreede also is a university lecturer in management, communication and IT at the Management Center Innsbruck, Austria. He has taught undergraduate, graduate, doctoral and executive courses in areas such as agile software development, systems analysis and design, teamwork/facilitation and research methods.

His research focuses on crowdsourcing, collaborative risk and security management, collaboration engineering and the facilitation of teamwork. He received both a master's degree in information systems and a PhD in systems engineering from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.

Hevner is an eminent scholar in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department and holds the Citigroup/Hidden River Chair of Distributed Technology. He teaches graduate courses in software architecture, testing and advanced information systems analysis and design. He recently was named a Distinguished University Professor by the USF provost's office.

"My impact in the field of information systems and technology design have benefited from my collaborations with many talented scholars from around the world," he said. "It is exciting to know that my efforts have contributed in some way to numerous research projects that have produced design innovations to address important societal problems and opportunities."

He was elected fellow by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's largest general scientific society, and he has coauthored chapters and books and has published more than 150 papers. A significant number of his research contributions have been implemented and evaluated in business and industrial information systems.

(This story was originally published on May 5, 2017 and updated on Jan. 23, 2018.).