Writing DSR Articles for Maximum Impact

Design Science Research (DSR) projects are diverse along various dimensions (e.g., methodological reference approach, level of contribution, type of evaluation) and they produce a vast amount of information. This poses problems especially for less experienced design researchers who wish to write and publish DSR articles. Since DSR projects hardly fit the established structure of mainstream research articles in Information Systems, it is not entirely clear which aspects of the research project should be communicated and how to compile them. Existing guidance for a specific DSR article structure (Gregor and Hevner, 2013) is generic and has not been adapted yet to different types of DSR research projects. The purpose of the study at hand is to design a guide for design researchers that accommodates the diversity among DSR projects and clarifies what should be reported in which sequence. The concept of design patterns and various descriptive studies were used to design and evaluate the proposed guidance artefact.