Towards an understanding of how and why Design Science Research scholars evaluate

Evaluation activities in Design Science Research not only verify utility but also scientific rigour and the truth-like value of prescriptive knowledge contributions. Assuming a lack of guidance, evaluation frameworks like the one of Sonnenberg and vom Brocke have been proposed prior to evaluating their actual utility to scholars. This research now aims at evaluating how scholars actually apply the framework in practice and their reasoning for doing so. The research-in-progress paper at hand presents preliminary results from a citation analysis. While we find an increasing awareness of the relevance of ex-ante evaluations, there is still a lack of comprehensive detail on ex-ante evaluation activities and an emphasis on ex-post evaluations in artificial settings. The call to accumulate incremental prescriptive knowledge has mostly been ignored and artifact changes are rarely disclosed. Therefore, we question the missing guidance as the sole reason that scholars emphasise building rather than evaluation. We propose to conduct a case study that investigates the reasons behind scholars’ evaluation decisions.