Aim/Purpose: This paper explores the implications of machine-mediated communication on human interaction in cross-disciplinary teams. The authors explore the relationships between Open Science Theory, its contributions to team science, and the opportunities and challenges associated with adopting open science principles. Background: Open Science Theory impacts many aspects of human interaction throughout the scholarly life cycle and can be seen in action through various technologies, which each typically touch only one such aspect. By serving multiple aspects of Open Science Theory at once, the Open Science Framework (OSF) serves as an exemplar technology. As such it illustrates how Open Science Theory can inform and expand cognitive and behavioral dynamics in teams at multiple levels in a single tool. Methodology: This concept paper provides a theoretical rationale for recommendations for exploring the connections between an open science paradigm and the dynamics of team communication. As such theory and evidence have been culled to initiate a synthesis of the nascent literature, current practice and theory. Contribution: This paper aims to illuminate the shared goals between open science and the study of teams by focusing on science team activities (data management, methods, algorithms, and outputs) as focal objects for further combined study. Findings: Team dynamics and characteristics that will affect successful human/machine assisted interactions through mediators of workflow culture, attitudes about ownership of knowledge, readiness to share openly, shifts from group-driven to user-driven functionality, group-organizing to self-organizing structures, and the development of trust as teams regulate between traditional and open science dissemination. Recommendations for Practitioners: Participation in open science practices through machine-assisted technologies in team projects/scholarship should be encouraged. Recommendation for Researchers: The information provided highlights areas in need of further study in team science as well as new primary sources of material in the study of teams utilizing machine-assisted methods in their work. Impact on Society: As researchers take on more complex social problems, new technology and open science practices can complement the work of diverse stakeholders while also providing opportunities to broaden impact and intensify scholarly contributions. Future Research: Future investigation into the cognitive and behavioral research conducted with teams that employ machine-assisted technologies in their workflows would offer researchers the opportunity to understand better the relationships between intelligent machines and science teams’ impacts on their communities as well as the necessary paradigmatic shifts inherent when utilizing these technologies.

Aim/Purpose: The complexity of scientific problems has spurred the development of transdisciplinary science, in which experts are brought together to collaborate across disciplinary and practice boundaries. These knowledge diverse teams can produce novel solutions, but they often fail to achieve their potential. Background: Leaders have a crucial role to play in enabling effective collaboration among these diverse experts. We propose that a critical predictor of whether a newly formed interdisciplinary team will perform well is the leader’s multidisciplinary breadth of experience, which we define as a leader’s possession of significant experience in multiple areas of research and practice. We suggest that these leaders will have the capability to skillfully manage the interactions within the team. Methodology: We test our prediction in a sample of 52 newly formed interdisciplinary medical research teams. We also observe and examine the communication patterns in a subset of these teams. Contribution: There is a lack of systematic study of the impact leaders have on newly formed interdisciplinary science teams whose members have little or no prior collaborative experience with each other, possess specialized knowledge, and have limited overlapping expertise. This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the effect of leader multidisciplinary experience on team communication patterns and innovation. Findings: Our study finds that teams are more innovative when their leader has a moderate breadth of multidisciplinary expertise. Exploration of team communication patterns suggests that leaders with moderate multidisciplinary breadth of experience actively stimulated information sharing across expert domains by choosing cross-cutting topics and drew individuals’ attention to the knowledge and approaches of others in the team. Recommendations for Practitioners: Insights from this work can have practical implications regarding how to best select and train leaders to facilitate cross-boundary collaboration in transdisciplinary science. This study elucidates a variety of communication strategies that leaders can to enhance the team innovativeness. Recommendation for Researchers: Further investigation into the underlying psychological states that these communication strategies elicit is needed. Future research should investigate psychological mediators such as knowledge consideration, perspective taking, and cognitive flexibility. Impact on Society: Transdisciplinary science is needed to solve society’s most complex problems. The more insight we gather about factors that can help these knowledge diverse teams to be successful, but more society will benefit. Future Research: More research is needed on team formation, leader experience, and team outcomes in transdisciplinary science teams in a variety of contexts.

Aim/Purpose: Given that leadership has been shown to play a key role in knowledge-producing organizations, leaders of transdisciplinary science have received surprisingly little empirical attention. This study addresses the research gap by examining leadership in the context of a new transdisciplinary research organization. Background: Drawing on complexity leadership theory—a framework developed for identifying behaviors that facilitate creativity, learning, and adaptability in complex adaptive systems—this study examines leadership roles and practices that affect the generation of adaptive dynamics in transdisciplinary science. Methodology: The study is based on a longitudinal, qualitative in-depth case study on a newly formed transdisciplinary research center and its leadership team. The data includes ethnographic observations from leadership meetings and interviews with leaders. Contribution: This unique empirical case contributes to the study of transdisciplinary science by shedding light on the actions of academic leaders as they try to support transdisciplinary conversation, learning, and collaboration in a new center. Findings: The analysis shows that the leaders relied on both enabling and administrative leadership practices in a way that made them the focal point of transdisciplinary knowledge integration and thus jeopardized the creation of adaptive dynamics throughout the organization. Recommendations for Practitioners: The study highlights the importance of having knowledge brokers and hybrid scholars in strategic positions at different levels of the transdisciplinary research organization already in its early stages. Recommendation for Researchers: Longitudinal qualitative case studies that rely on different types of data provide rich information on how new leadership conceptualizations are implemented in organizations and the complex ways in which they relate to knowledge creation processes and outcomes. Impact on Society: Transdisciplinary science has the potential to find cures to complex diseases. Understanding leadership in transdisciplinary science can help in maintaining transdisciplinary research activities in the long run and thus make it more impactful. Future Research: The use of leadership roles and practices will be examined at different developmental stages in the transdisciplinary research process.

Aim/Purpose: To understand the process of social change creation in social entrepreneurial ventures (SEVs), specifically emphasizing the role and nature of the communicative process in social change creation. Background: Drawing on data from seven SEVs from India and the US and employing a grounded theory methodology, this research scrutinizes the social change process and uncovers the role and characteristics of dialogue in this process. Methodology: Qualitative data was collected from seven social entrepreneurial organizations over a period of eight months from July 2011 to February 2012. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a wide range of members within these social entrepreneurial organizations (n=27) with additional informal interviews with field workers and volunteers. Data from the semi-structured interviews and notes from observations were integrated with analyses of archival resources. Contribution: There is little scholarship about the process of social change creation and the necessary conditions to promote social change over time. Understanding the process of social change creation and the individual, interpersonal, and organizational conditions that facilitate the process is central to design of effective trans-sector TD problem solving ventures. This paper focuses on the process of social change creation in social entrepreneurial settings, specifically emphasizing the role and nature of the communicative process in social change creation. Findings: The reflections and experiences of the members of SEVs revealed that social entrepreneurship is a collective endeavor and this collective character is essential to its success. Collective organization and synergy, deep intra-organizational communication, and a conducive organizational context are critical for the creation of collective wisdom and knowledge networks for long-term collaborative community capacity building. Dialogue emerged as a central category linking the other categories to explain the process of social change creation. Organic organizational structure enables knowledge creation and integration through the process of organizational learning through deep and continuous social interaction, or dialogue. Recommendations for Practitioners: This research elucidated the key characteristics of the organizational context required to support the creation of social change. It also identified the critical role and characteristics of the communicative process required to generate structural knowledge and collective wisdom at the organizational level. Recommendation for Researchers: For individual and organizational learning, trans-sector transdisciplinary organizations require an appropriate organizational context. Key elements of such an organizational context include (1) understanding the ecology of the social problem; (2) organic organizational structure; (3) continuous and deep social interaction among all levels of the organization; (4) employee and community autonomy and empowerment; and (5) attention to subtle environmental changes in the system. These elements in combination lead to the creation of collective wisdom. Collective wisdom then feeds back into the conception, planning, and action stages of the iterative cycle of organizational knowledge creation to create positive social change. Impact on Society: Same as above Future Research: Future research model theoretically and study empirically the ecology of social entrepreneurship and trans-sector TD problem solving more broadly. For example, the ways in the personal attributes of social entrepreneurs (e.g., their leadership style, networking abilities) combine with circumstances at organizational, institutional, and international levels to influence the effectiveness of their efforts to promote positive social change within local and global communities. Second, the grounded theoretical framework developed here should be further refined and elaborated through the identification of additional key contextual factors that affect SEVs’ capacity to promote positive social change and to achieve sustainability in different socio-environmental contexts. There is also a need to translate the findings from this research to facilitate the creation of more inclusive problem solving contexts and practices.

Aim/Purpose: Collaborative, interdisciplinary research is growing rapidly, but we still have limited and fragmented understanding of what is arguably the heart of such research—collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning (CIR). Background: This article integrates neo-Pragmatist theories of reasoning with insights from literature on interdisciplinary research to develop a working definition of collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning. The article then applies this definition to an empirical example to demonstrate its utility. Methodology: The empirical example is an excerpt from a Toolbox workshop transcript. The article reconstructs a cogent, inductive, interdisciplinary argument from the excerpt to show how CIR can proceed in an actual team. Contribution: The study contributes operational definitions of ‘reasoning together’ and ‘collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning’ to existing literature. It also demonstrates empirical methods for operationalizing these definitions, with the argument reconstruction providing a brief case study in how teams reason together. Findings: 1. Collaborative, interdisciplinary reasoning is the attempted integration of disciplinary contributions to exchange, evaluate, and assert claims that enable shared understanding and eventually action in a local context. 2. Pragma-dialectic argument reconstruction with conversation analysis is a method for observing such reasoning from a transcript. 3. The example team developed a strong inductive argument to integrate their disciplinary contributions about modeling. Recommendations for Practitioners: 1. Interdisciplinary work requires agreeing with teammates about what is assertible and why. 2. To assert something together legitimately requires making a cogent, integrated argument. Recommendation for Researchers: 1. An argument is the basic unit of analysis for interdisciplinary integration. 2. To assess the argument’s cogency, it is helpful to reconstruct it using pragma-dialectic principles and conversation analysis tools. 3. To assess the argument’s interdisciplinary integration and participant roles in the integration, it is helpful to graph the flow of words as a Sankey chart from participant-disciplines to the argument conclusion. Future Research: How does this definition of CIR relate to other interdisciplinary ‘cognition’ or ‘learning’ type theories? How can practitioners and theorists tell the difference between true intersubjectivity and superficial agreeableness in these dialogues? What makes an instance of CIR ‘good’ or ‘bad’? How does collaborative, transdisciplinary reasoning differ from CIR, if at all?

Aim/Purpose: Transdisciplinarity is considered as a framework for understanding knowledge producing teams (KPTs). Features of transdisciplinary knowledge producing teams (TDKPTs) are provided using a complex adaptive systems (CAS) lens. TDKPT features are defined and linked to complexity theory to show how team participants might develop skills that more truly express complex adaptive conditions. Background: TDKPTs are groups of stakeholder participants tasked with producing knowledge across disciplinary, sectoral, and ecological boundaries. TDKPTs reflect components of complex adaptive systems (CAS) and exemplify how CAS behave and function. Methodology: The paper accesses literature from the Science-of-Team-Science (SciTS), complexity theory, and systems theory to construct a typology of the features of TDKPTs. Contribution: This paper provides a list of features developed from a diverse body of literature useful for considering complexity within TDKPTs. Findings: The paper proposes a series of features of transdisciplinary knowledge producing teams. In addition, the authors identify important skill building aspects needed for TDKPTs to be successful. Recommendations for Practitioners: The paper provides a framework by which team functioning can be considered and enhanced within TDKPTs. Recommendation for Researchers: The paper suggests categorical features of transdisciplinary teams for research on the collaborative processes and outcomes of TD teams. Future Research: Knowledge producing team members need to engage in theoretical, episte-mological, and methodological reflections to elucidate the dynamic nature of TD knowledge producing teams. Understanding how conflict, dissonance, and reciprocal interdependencies contribute to knowledge generation are key areas of future research and inquiry.

Aim/Purpose: This is an introductory paper for the Special Series on transdisciplinary communication. It summarizes the various articles in the special series and raises questions for future investigation.

Aim/Purpose: This paper describes an empirical examination of how users’ willingness to disclose personal data is influenced by the amount of information provided on landing pages – standalone web pages created explicitly for marketing or advertising campaigns. Background: Provision of information is a central construct in the IS discipline. Content is a term commonly used to describe the information made available by a website or other electronic medium. A pertinent debate among scholars and practitioners relate to the behavioral impact of content volume: Specifically, does a greater amount of information elicit engagement and compliance, or the other way around? Methodology: A series of large-scale web experiments (n= 535 and n= 27,900) were conducted employing a between-subjects design and A/B testing. Two variants of landing pages, long and short, were created based on relevant behavioral theories. Both variants included an identical form to collect users’ information, but different amounts of provided content. User traffic was generated using Google AdWords and randomized between the page using Unbounce.com. Relevant usage metrics, such as response rate (called “conversion rate”), location, and visit time were recorded. Contribution: This research contributes to the body of knowledge on information provision and its effectiveness and carries practical and theoretical implications to practitioners and scholars in Information Systems, Informing Science, Communications, Digital Marketing, and related fields. Findings: Analyses of results show that the shorter landing pages had significantly higher conversion rates across all locations and times. Findings demonstrate a negative correlation between the content amount and consumer behavior, suggesting that users who had less information were more inclined to provide their data. Recommendations for Practitioners: At a practical level, results can empirically support business practices, design considerations, and content strategy by informing practitioners on the role of content in online commerce. Recommendation for Researchers: Findings suggest that the amount of content plays a significant role in online decision making and effective informing. They also contradict prior research on trust, persuasion, and security. This study advances research on the paradoxical relationship between the increased level of information and online decision-making and indicates that contrary to earlier work, not all persuasion theories‎ are ‎effective online. Impact on Society: Understanding how information drives behavior has implications in many domains (civic engagement, health, education, and more). This has relevance to system design and public communication in both online and offline contexts. Future Research: Using this research as a starting point, future research can examine the impact of content in other contexts, as well as other behavioral drivers (such as demographic data). This can lead to theoretical, methodological, and practical recommendations.

Aim/Purpose: Provides a theoretical model as to where we should source our information as the environment becomes more complex. Background: Develops a theoretical model built on extrinsic complexity and offers a conceptual scheme relating to the relative value of different sources. Methodology: The paper is purely conceptual in nature. Contribution: Develops a model that could be tested relating to where clients should search for information. Findings: Arguments can be made that different environments warrant different priorities for informing sources. Recommendations for Practitioners: Assess how your sources of information match your perceived environment. Recommendation for Researchers: Consider developing research designs to test the proposed model. Impact on Society: Offers a new way of thinking about informing sources. Future Research: Develop propositions from the model that could be empirically tested in future research.

Table of contents for Volume 21 of Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2018.

Aim/Purpose: The paper explores the success of KGB Operation SIG to incite hatred and create chaos against a democracy Background: About 50 years ago, the KGB created the means to create upheaval in the Mid-dle East. This paper explores one such campaign and its successor campaign, revealing some disinformation techniques in use today. Methodology: The paper brings together literature from many fields in its exploration of Op-eration SIG. Contribution: The paper reveals the role of the KGB in the PLO’s campaign to replace Israel with an Arab Muslim state and the PLO and Hamas’s successor disinformation mechanisms Findings: Operation SIG is an early and extremely successful example of the Sovi-et/Russian campaign to disrupt democracy. Recommendation for Researchers: The recurrence of antisemitism, particularly on campus, can be attributed to Operation SIG.

Aim/Purpose: The paper provides general background on the who, what, when, and why of deception. Methodology: It uses a naturalistic observational methodology. Whenever possible, the paper provides examples. Contribution: The research cited in this paper comes from a large variety of disparate fields of study. As such, it is one of the few multidisciplinary attempts to understand de-ception Findings: The research uncovered general principles for conducting deception and tactics that support these principles. Recommendation for Researchers: The authors hope that this paper’s finding will shed light on the topic of fake news as well as misinformation and disinformation, particularly in politics.

The present paper identifies a variety of conceptual schemes that have emerged within informing science and consider how they might be applied to fake news. The paper begins with a brief overview of fake news. This is followed presentations of various models identified in a two-volume survey of informing science. The models presented include those dealing with extrinsic (i.e., environmental) complexity, informing transitions, and individual resonance. The potential implications for informing science research into fake news are discussed and questions that may warrant future research are raised. The paper then concludes by describing what current informing science may already be telling us about fake news, its spread and its influence. Through its analysis of the fake news and informing science literature, a number of questions are identified where informing science can possibly contribute to our understanding of fake news. These include: • Does fake news need to disinform its clients if it is to be effective? • Why are certain groups of individuals particularly credible when it comes to communicating fake news? • Under what circumstances will the emotional and social motivations to accept fake news exceed our concern for its truth? • How does the nature of the fake news content and objectives impact the disinformer’s choice of channel? • What are the circumstances under which radically transitional fake news might have an impact?

Aim/Purpose: Many disciplines have addressed the issue of “fake news.” This topic is of central concern to the transdiscipline of Informing Science, which endeavors to understand all issues related to informing. This paper endeavors to build a model to address not only fake news but all informing and misin-forming. To do this, it explores how errors get into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the models previously created to explore the complexity of informing. That is, this paper examines models and frameworks proposed to explore informing in the presence of bias, misinformation, disinformation, and fake news from the perspective of Informing Science. It concludes by intro-ducing a more nuanced model that considers some of the topics explored in the paper Methodology: The issue of informing and disinforming crosses many disciplinary perspectives. Each discipline puts on blinders that limit what it can contribute to its understanding of research topics. It is like trying to study a forest by seeing only the trees and not the animals or the animals but not the trees. Research perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries are needed to more fully understand complex phenomena. This paper lays out some fundamental cross-disciplinary issues including how errors find their way into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the frameworks used to model this phenomenon. Contribution: The paper introduces the competition framework for understanding informing and misinforming. This framework addresses many of the limitation of prior frameworks. Future Research: The concluding framework offers insights into understanding informing and disinforming. But this framework offers no insights into other forms of informing that are less well explored, such as song, dance, physical art, and architecture. Likewise, this framework does nothing to help the un-derstanding of informing via fideism or psychedelic revelation.

Aim/Purpose: This series of papers on Fake News: Bias, Misinformation, and Disinformation examines fake news from an Informing Science perspective. As such, the papers in this special series make novel con-tributions to the field by viewing the issues through the transdisciplinary lens of informing science. This series makes no claim to summarize or review all that has been written on this topic. Rather it provides a glimpse into this immense literature from the perspective of informing science. Background: It is one small step on the 20+ year quest by the editor to explore better ways to inform from an approach that transcends academic disciplines (Cohen, 1998, 1999) and a 20 year quest to under-stand the issues of how we become misinformed and disinformed (Cohen, 2000). The series pro-vided here gains thrust for two reasons. One reason is that the study has become more popular with academicians due to the blathering of politicians and the attacks by national powers on de-mocracy. The second reason is more mundane; without the deadline that the end-of-year affords, the papers would become richer, fuller, and more detailed. Recommendation for Researchers: Taken together, the results brought forth across these papers is truly scary. Due to their biases, when presented with information, people can and do generate their own misinformation. People tend to communicate such misinformation that they self-generated with others in groups sharing their beliefs, strengthening the misinformation by some and silencing those do not share these thoughts. This process creates divisions in society. How can humanity seek wise decisions when we cannot agree even upon the facts. We see the results of this syndrome in Operation SIG and cur-rent divisions within politics in the West.

Aim/Purpose: The year 2020 marks the 50th anniversary of the first official definition of the term “transdisciplinarity.” This paper focuses on a critical analysis of the development of modern transdisciplinarity since its inception. Background: The article presents two main directions for the development of transdisciplinarity. It also shows its identification features, strengths, and weaknesses, as well as the significant role transdisciplinarity plays in science and education. Methodology: The methodology employed in this article is a content analysis of resolutions of international forums as well as articles on transdisciplinarity published from 1970 to 2019. Contribution: For one reason or the other, several of these authors did not quote the opinions of the original authors of transdisciplinarity. The subsequent use of those articles by other authors thus posed some ambiguities about the place and role of transdisciplinarity in science and education. The advent of e-databases has made it possible to access the original forum articles. This further made it possible to refine the original content of the term “transdisciplinarity” and to trace its development without mixing it with vague opinions. Based on these findings, the perception of transdisciplinarity as a marginal trend in science and education could be eliminated. Findings: This paper shows how modern transdisciplinarity is developing into two main directions: transdisciplinarity in science as well as transdisciplinarity in education. These orientations have individual goals and objectives. The transdisciplinarity of scientific research helps to complete the transformation of the potential for interdisciplinary interaction and the integration of disciplines. Whereas, in education, transdisciplinarity (meta-discipline) is about developing an international standard for transdisciplinary education and also describing the content of transdisciplinary competence for students of diverse disciplines at all levels of higher education (bachelor’s, master’s and postgraduate studies). Recommendation for Researchers: Transdisciplinary research involves the interaction of people with disciplinary knowledge plus a degree of scientific outlook. Since disciplinary knowledge domains remain in their disciplinary boxes, it is, therefore, advisable to generalize disciplinary knowledge rather than force them to interact. This is the basis for proposing the systems transdisciplinary approach—which provides a methodology for unifying and generalizing disciplinary knowledge. Future Research: As the research shows, the organizers of modern international forums do not take into account the division of transdisciplinarity development trends. To increase the effectiveness and significance of such forums, it is necessary to return to the practice of organizing special international forums on the transdisciplinarity of science and that of education.

Aim/Purpose: Absence of new scientific approaches and specialists (generalists), who professionally obtain such approaches, is one of the main reasons for an ineffective solution of complex multifactor problems of the modern society. Background: The article briefly describes the concept of systems transdisciplinary integration of knowledge of different scientific disciplines. Also, it shows an opportunity to use this concept education of generalists in higher education. Methodology: The article highlights the idea of gestalt of knowledge, which is based on systems transdisciplinary model of spatial unit of order. It describes the basis of gestalt-of-the-one and gestalt-of-the-whole. Also, it explains the differences and practical capabilities of holist generalists and unicentrist generalists. Contribution: Loss of identificational attributes can take place during the process of integration of knowledge of different scientific disciplines. The article shows how to avoid this complication within a systems transdisciplinary approach. Findings: Each type of fundamental knowledge has its own carriers, such as scientists and specialists. Therefore, direct interaction of people-carriers of fundamental knowledge has limited potential. Presently, a more practical importance is the interaction between scientists and specialists within the zones of hybridization of fundamental knowledge. Hybridization is the process of systematization of knowledge within specialized systems transdisciplinary models of unit of order. A specialist generalist’s professional work is to organize scientific research, systemise knowledge of different scientific disciplines, make necessary conclusions, and suggest optimal solution for complex multifactor problems. Therefore, generalists should be considered as an important move towards the solution of complex multifactor problems of modern society. Recommendation for Researchers: A new scientific approach is a way of widening scientific worldview. A new approach in inorganic chemistry made it possible to create the Mendeleev periodic table of elements. Owing to this table, researchers were able to learn the characteristics and attributes of chemical elements, which can be found in nature. Also, models of systems transdisciplinary approach allow the discovery of new elements and relations of complex multifactor problems. Its absence would, however, hinder the research and the problem description. Future Research: The article justifies that preparation of generalists in higher education is one of the main peculiarities of universities of the third generation. Therefore, it might be desirable for organizers of higher education and university leaders to begin speculations regarding this quest, develop educational programs for generalists, and search for optimal forms and methods of solution.

Aim/Purpose: In this paper, we address the theoretical challenges today’s scientific community faces to precisely draw lines between true and false pictures. In particular, we focus on problems related to the hidden wonders of science and the shiny images produced for scientific papers or to appeal to wider audiences. Background: As rumors (hoaxes) and false news (fake news) explode across society and the current network, several initiatives using current technology have been launched to study this phenomena and limit the social impact. Over the last two decades, inappropriate scientific behavior has raised more questions about whether some scientific images are valid. Methodology: This work is not about analyzing whether today’s images are objective. Instead, we advocate for a general approach that makes it easier to truly believe in all kinds of knowledge, scientific or otherwise (Goldman, 1967; Goldman, & Olson, 2009). This need to believe is closely related to social order (Shapin, 1994). Contribution: We conclude that we must ultimately move away from older ideas about truth and objectivity in research to broadly approach how science and knowledge are represented and move forward with this theoretical approach when communicating science to the public. Findings: Contemporary visual culture suggests that our world is expressed through images, which are all around us. Therefore, we need to promote the reliability of scientific pictures, which visually represent knowledge, to add meaning in a world of complex high-tech science (Allamel-Raffin, 2011; Greenberg, 2004; Rosenberger, 2009). Since the time of Galileo, and today more than ever, scientific activity should be understood as knowledge produced to reveal, and therefore inform us of, (Wise, 2006) all that remains unexplained in our world, as well as everything beyond our senses. Recommendation for Researchers: In journalism, published scientific images must be properly explained. Journalists should tell people the truth, not fake objectivity. Today we must understand that scientific knowledge is mapped, simulated, and accessed through interfaces, and is uncertain. The scientific community needs to approach and explain how knowledge is represented, while paying attention to detail. Future Research: In today’s expanding world, scientific research takes a more visual approach. It is important for both the scientific community and the public to understand how the technologies used to visually represent knowledge can account for why, for example, we know more about electrons than we did a century ago (Arabatzis, 1996), or why we are beginning to carefully understand the complexities and ethical problems related to images used to promote knowledge through the media (see, i.e., López-Cantos, 2017).

Aim/Purpose: The aim of this paper is to propose an ensemble learners based classification model for classification clickbaits from genuine article headlines. Background: Clickbaits are online articles with deliberately designed misleading titles for luring more and more readers to open the intended web page. Clickbaits are used to tempted visitors to click on a particular link either to monetize the landing page or to spread the false news for sensationalization. The presence of clickbaits on any news aggregator portal may lead to an unpleasant experience for readers. Therefore, it is essential to distinguish clickbaits from authentic headlines to mitigate their impact on readers’ perception. Methodology: A total of one hundred thousand article headlines are collected from news aggregator sites consists of clickbaits and authentic news headlines. The collected data samples are divided into five training sets of balanced and unbalanced data. The natural language processing techniques are used to extract 19 manually selected features from article headlines. Contribution: Three ensemble learning techniques including bagging, boosting, and random forests are used to design a classifier model for classifying a given headline into the clickbait or non-clickbait. The performances of learners are evaluated using accuracy, precision, recall, and F-measures. Findings: It is observed that the random forest classifier detects clickbaits better than the other classifiers with an accuracy of 91.16 %, a total precision, recall, and f-measure of 91 %.

Aim/Purpose: The growing complexity of the business environment and business processes as well as the Big Data phenomenon has an impact on every area of human activity nowadays. This new reality challenges the effectiveness of traditional narrowly oriented professional education. New areas of competences emerged as a synergy of multiple knowledge areas – transdisciplines. Informing Science and Data Science are just the first two such new areas we may identify as transdisciplines. Universities are facing the challenge to educate students for those new realities. Background: The purpose of the paper is to share the authors’ experience in designing curriculum for training bachelor students in Informing Science as a concentration within an Information Brokerage major, and a master program on Data Science. Methodology: Designing curriculum for transdisciplines requires diverse expertise obtained by both academia and industries and passed through several stages - identifying objectives, conceptualizing curriculum models, identifying content, and development pedagogical priorities. Contribution: Sharing our experience acquired in designing transdiscipline programs will contribute to a transition from a narrow professional education towards addressing 21st-century challenges. Findings: Analytical skills, combined with training in all categories of so-called “soft skills”, are essential in preparing students for a successful career in a transdiciplinary area of activities. Recommendations for Practitioners: Establishing a working environment encouraging not only sharing but close cooperation is essential nowadays. Recommendations for Researchers: There are two aspects of training professionals capable of succeeding in a transdisciplinary environment: encouraging mutual respect and developing out-of-box thinking. Impact on Society: The transition of higher education in a way to meet current challenges. Future Research The next steps in this research are to collect feedback regarding the professional careers of students graduating in these two programs and to adjust the curriculum accordingly.

Aim/Purpose: In a world of rapidly expanding complexity and exponentially increasing data availability, IT-based knowledge management tools will be needed to manage and curate available information. This paper looks at a particular tool architecture that has been previously proposed: The Personal Knowledge Management System (PKMS). The specific focus is on how the proposed architecture conforms to design science principles that relate to how it is likely to evolve. Background: We first introduce some recent informing science and design science research frameworks, then examine how the PKMS architecture would conform to these. Methodology: The approach taken is conceptual analysis. Contribution: The analysis provides a clearer understanding of how the proposed PKMS would serve the diverse-client ambiguous-target (DCAT) informing scenario and how it could be expected to evolve. Findings: We demonstrate how the PKMS informing architecture can be characterized as a “social machine” that appears to conform to a number of principles that would facilitate its long-term evolution. Future Research: The example provided by the paper could serve as a model future research seeking to integrate design science and informing science in the study of IT artefacts.

Table of Contents for Volume 22 of Informing Science: the International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2019

Aim/Purpose: The Informing Science Institute (ISI) is an informing system, designed using informing science principles, for the express purpose of informing researchers who study problems related to informing. This paper describes the ISI as an applied instance of an informing system and analyzes the channels, informers, and clients of the ISI. Background: This paper begins with a brief overview of the current activity of the ISI, as well as an introduction to informing science philosophy and an explanation of the need for a transdiscipline. The ISI is a non-profit organization that provides several informing channels, including 13 open-access, peer-reviewed journals, as well as conferences, books, and outreach activities. Methodology: Statistical analyses of the authors, institutions, and countries of origin were conducted for every ISI paper published between 1998 and December of 2019. Additionally, interviews were conducted with 5 current and former Editors-in-Chief of ISI journals. Contribution: This paper provides a current description and analysis of the ISI informing system’s channels, informers, and clients. Findings: The ISI has published over 4,100 articles by over 4,500 authors from over 600 universities. Statistical analyses of articles published in ISI journals demonstrated that the ISI is characterized in part by robust international participation, with significant participation by authors from countries that have been traditionally under-represented in academic publications. The ISI achieved these outcomes through the use of the philosophical principles and design guidelines for informing science.

Aim/Purpose: The aim is to explore the informing flows framework as interactions within a PhD education practicing a work-integrated learning approach in order to reveal both the perspectives of industrial PhD students and of industry. Background: An under-researched field of university-industry collaboration is explored revealing both the perspectives of industrial PhD students and of industry. Methodology: Qualitative methods were applied including interviews and document studies. In total ten semi-structured interviews in two steps were conducted. The empirical context is a Swedish PhD program in informatics with a specialization in work-integrated learning. Contribution: By broadening the concept of work-integrated learning, this paper contributes empirical results on benefits and challenges in university-industry collaboration focusing on industrial PhD students and industry by applying the informing flows framework. Findings: Findings expose novel insights for industry as well as academia. The industrial PhD students are key stakeholders and embody the informing flows between practice and university and between practice and research. They are spanning boundaries between university and industry generating continuous opportunities for validation and testing of empirical results and models in industry. This may enable increased research quality and short-lag dissemination of research results as well as strengthened organizational legitimacy. Recommendation for Researchers: Academia is recommended to recognize the value of the industrial PhD students’ pre-understanding of the industry context in the spirit of work-integrated learning approach. The conditions for informing flows between research and practice need to continuously be maintained to enable short-term societal impact of research for both academia and industry. For practitioners: This explorative study show that it is vital for practice to recognize that challenges do exist and need to be considered to strengthen industrial PhD pro-grams as well as university-industry collaborations. Additionally, it is of importance to formalize a continuously dissemination of research in the industries. Future Research: Future international and/or transdisciplinary research within this field is encouraged to include larger samples covering other universities and a mix of industrial contexts or comparing industrial PhD students in different phases of their PhD education.

Aim/Purpose: As traditional Knowledge Management (KM) struggles to support the personal needs of knowledge workers in a new era of accelerating information abundance, we examine the shortcomings and put forward alternative scenarios and architectures for developing a novel Personal KM System (PKMS). Background: While prior publications focused on the complementing features compared to conventional dynamic KM models, our emphasis shifts to instantiating a flourishing PKMS community supported by a Digital Platform Ecosystem. Methodology: Design science research focusing on conceptual analysis and prototyping. Contribution: The PKMS concept advances the understanding of how digital platform communities may serve members with highly diverse skills and ambitions better to gainfully utilize the platform’s resources and generative potential in their personal and local settings. Findings: We demonstrate how the needs to tackle attention-consuming rising entropy and to benefit from generative innovation potentials can be addressed. Future Research: As this article has iteratively co-evolved with the preparing of a PKMS implementation, business, and roll-out plan, the prototype’s testing, completion, and subsequent migration to a viable system is of primary concern.

Aim/Purpose: There is a need to find a way to utilize narrative storytelling in film to make students more aware of the impacts of global problems and how they are perceived. Background: Two films from the year 2015 from two very different places in the world explore the encroachment and secondary effects of urban civilization upon indigenous cultures. Methodology: An interpretive, qualitative, methodology was used in addressing and discussing the use of these two films as a persuasive communication teaching aid. Contribution: This paper offers an approach to using narratives of films on indigenous issues in education to inform students about real-world issues and the wide impacts of those on various cultures and populations. Findings: Through the discussion of the two films, we suggest that using films with indigenous themes is beneficial to a course curriculum in a variety of subjects from communication to history and politics, to help students visualize the problems at hand. Anecdotally, the authors note that students are more engaged and willing to discuss topics if they have watched films or clips that deal with those topics than if they have simply read about them. Recommendation for Researchers: Technology and use of visuals are used as teaching tools in a variety of fields. Film narratives can be used as a teaching tool in multiple fields and provide insight about a variety of ideas. Identifying films such as those with indigenous themes provides an example of how one film can bring up multiple, real-world, topics and through led discussion student reflection can potentially lead to self-insights and have lasting impacts. Future Research: Additional research and assessment can be done on the impact of teaching with films and their compelling story telling of issues, and what types of questions should be asked to maximize learning and the impact of film narratives.

Aim/Purpose: The paper introduces new concepts including cognitive mapping, cognitive message processing, and message resonance. Background: This paper draws upon philosophy, psychology, physiology, communications, and introspection to develop the theory of cognitive mapping. Methodology: Theory development Contribution: The theory offers new ways to conceptualize the informing process. Findings: Cognitive mapping has a far-reaching explanatory power on message resonance. Recommendation for Researchers: The theory of cognitive mapping offers a new conceptualization for those exploring the informing process that is ripe for exploration and theory testing. Future Research: This paper forms a building block toward the development of a fuller model of the informing process.

Aim/Purpose: Although a literature review is the fundamental base for any research, it is often considered tedious and conducted with a lack of methodology and rigor. The paper presents a method for systematically searching and screening literature using modern search technologies. The method focuses on minimizing the amount of manual screening by employing the references among papers. Background: A method to select quality literature effectively using modern search technologies is presented and evaluated. Methodology: The method starts with a keywords search in which the most suitable keywords are identified. In the backward search, promising resources are collected based on the keywords and their reference sections are searched for duplicates to find often cited basic literature. Then, the forward search identifies current literature that cites the basic sources. Contribution: Modern search technologies have the potential to improve the effectiveness of the use of information channels significantly and thus of traditional literature searches. Findings: The selection method was applied to the field of literature review itself and to the field of functional modelling. In both cases, relevant literature was identified within a surprisingly short time. Recommendation for Researchers: Literature reviews should be done systematically by using modern search technologies. Future Research: The presented method may be adapted according to the evolution of search technologies. The tool support for the automated extraction of references should be improved and a quantitative evaluation of the method in comparison to traditional reviews may foster the findings.

Aim/Purpose: Use of the term “rigor” is ubiquitous in the research community. But do we actually know what it means, and how it applies to transdisciplinary research? Background: Too often, rigor is presumed to mean following an established research protocol scrupulously. Unfortunately, that frequently leads to research with little or no impact. Methodology: We identify a sample of 62 articles with “rigor” in the title and analyze their content in order to capture the range of perspectives on rigor. We then analyze how these findings might apply to informing science. Contribution: This paper offers an approach to defining rigor that is theory based and appropriate for transdisciplinary research. Findings: Rigor definitions tend to fall into one of two categories: criteria-based and compliance-based. Which is appropriate depends on the research context. Even more variation was found with respect to relevance, which is often used as a catch-all for research characteristics that aren’t associated with rigor. Recommendations for Practitioners: Recognize that when researchers are referring to rigor and relevance, they of-ten mean these to apply to other researchers rather than to practice. When funding research, it is important to understand who the rigor and relevance are directed towards. Recommendations for Researchers: When using the term “rigor”, think carefully about which meaning is intended and be transparent about that meaning in your writing. Impact on Society: A great deal of public money is invested in achieving research rigor. Society should be aware of what it is buying with that funding. Future Research: Developing a better understanding of research fitness and the factors that contribute to it.

Aim/Purpose: The research problem of this study refers to the manner in which old and new mass media represented the significant social development surrounding two crashes of the Boeing 737 MAX airplane. Methodology: The study follows a qualitative case study methodology based on a sample of newspaper articles, TV programming, specialized technical publications, Twitter posts, and Facebook content. Contribution: The study contributes to understanding specifics and differences in representing extraordinary socio-economic events by different types of media. Findings: Key findings are that these media have constructed different realities surrounding the tragic events and exhibited informing distortions to different degrees. Recommendations for Practitioners: Practical implications of this study are relevant for the institutional and individual clients of informing with regard to selecting appropriate media for use. There are also implications for informers with regard to reducing distortions in informing. Recommendation for Researchers: Social media could be a channel for alternative learning rather than manipulation. Mainstream media were confirmed to be a loudspeaker for authorities as postulated in critical media research, and analytical media provided influential, deeper technical analysis. Future Research: As the Boeing case unfolds, it would be interesting to investigate any evolution in mediated realities.

Aim/Purpose: To discuss the Design Science Research approach by comparing some of its canons with observed practices in projects in which it is applied, in order to understand and structure it better. Background: Recent criticisms of the application of the Design Science Research (DSR) approach have pointed out the need to make it more approachable and less confusing to overcome deficiencies such as the unrealistic evaluation. Methodology: We identified and analyzed 92 articles that presented artifacts developed from DSR projects and another 60 articles with preceding or subsequent actions associated with these 92 projects. We applied the content analysis technique to these 152 articles, enabling the preparation of network diagrams and an analysis of the longitudinal evolution of these projects in terms of activities performed and the types of artifacts involved. Contribution: The content analysis of these 152 articles enabled the preparation of network diagrams and an analysis of the longitudinal evolution of these projects in terms of the activities and types of artifacts involved. Evidence was found of a precedence hierarchy among different types of artifacts, as well as nine new opportunities for entry points for the continuity of DSR studies. Only 14% of the DSR artifacts underwent an evaluation by typical end users, characterizing a tenth type of entry point. Regarding the evaluation process, four aspects were identified, which demonstrated that 86% of DSR artifact evaluations are unrealistic. Findings: We identified and defined a set of attributes that allows a better characterization and structuring of the artifact evaluation process. Analyzing the field data, we inferred a precedence hierarchy for different artifacts types, as well as nine new opportunities for entry points for the continuity of DSR studies. Recommendation for Researchers: The four attributes identified for analyzing evaluation processes serve as guidelines for practitioners and researchers to achieve a realistic evaluation of artifacts. Future Research: The nine new entry points identified serve as an inspiration for researchers to give continuity to DSR projects.

Table of Contents for Volume 23 of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2020.

Aim/Purpose: In this paper we propose an ecosystem for translational learning that combines core learning principles with a multilevel construct that embraces the tenets of translational research, namely, teaming, translating, and implementing. The goal of the paper is to argue that knowledge of learning sciences is essential at the individual, team, and organizational levels in the translational science enterprise. Background: The two decades that we can now call the translational era of health and medicine have not been without challenges. Many inroads have been made in navigating how scientific teaming, translating knowledge across the health spectrum, and implementing change to our health systems, policies, and interventions can serve our changing global environment. These changes to the traditional health science enterprise require new ways of understanding knowledge, forging relationships, and managing this new tradition of science. Competency requirements that have become important to the enterprise are dependent on a deep understanding about how people learn as individuals, in teams, and within organizations and systems. Methodology: An individual, team, and organizational conceptual framework for learning in translational ecosystems is developed drawing on the learning science literature, a synthesis of 9 key learning principles and integrated with core competencies for translational science. Contribution: The translational learning ecosystem is a means by which to understand how translational science competencies can be reinforced by core learning principles as teaming, translating, and implementation intersect as part of the translational science enterprise. Findings: This paper connects learning science to tailored principles in a simplified way so that those working translational science with less knowledge of theories of learning and pedagogy may be able to access it in a clear and concise way. Recommendation for Researchers: This paper provides a framework for researchers who engage in the education of translational scientists as well as those who are charged with training new scientists in an emerging field critical to health and medicine. Future Research: The translational ecosystem described can serve to expand how teaching and learning impact scientific advances. In addition, it serves as a means in which to understand the impact of learning on micro, meso, and macro levels.

Aim/Purpose: This article takes ‘tourism decision-making behavior’ as an entry point, and deeply analyzes the factors influencing the travel decision-making of Chinese ‘American Travel’ tourists and their degree of influence, so as to provide a reference for the development of Chinese outbound tourism. Background: With the development of China’s economy and the improvement in people’s level, the outbound tourism market of Chinese residents has developed rapidly. The United States has become an important tourism destination country for Chinese residents’ outbound tourism, and China has also become one of the important tourist source countries of American tourism. However, the rapid development of ‘American tourism’ has also caused competition problems in China’s tourism industry. For example, prices and tourism products have become a means of competition among tourism enterprises. As the main body of consumption, tourists’ decision-making behavior will be affected by various factors. Methodology: Drawing lessons from previous scholars’ research results on tourism decision-making behavior, the influencing factors of tourism decision-making behavior are summarized. A theoretical model and index system of factors influencing tourism decision-making behavior of Chinese residents ‘Travel in the United States’ are established, research hypotheses are put forward, questionnaire data are collected, and SPSS and Amos are used to analyze and verify the theoretical model. Contribution: This research expands the literature on topics related to tourism decision-making in research and practice. It establishes a theoretical model and index system for the factors that influence the decision-making behavior of Chinese residents’ ‘American Travel’ tourism. In addition, we propose countermeasures for tourism products, enterprises, and the government. Findings: Prior knowledge and external information have a positive influence on tourism perception and value perception, and a negative influence on risk perception. Risk perception value perception has a positive and negative influence on tourism decision-making and tourism motivation, respectively. Tourism motivation has a positive influence on tourism decision-making and has a positive impact. Recommendation for Researchers: According to the research conclusions of this article, the following counter-measures and suggestions are put forward from three aspects of tourism: products, enterprises, and governments. On the basis of existing tourism products, relevant operating companies should pay more attention to the upgrading and transformation of tourism, leisure and entertainment products in scenic spots to increase the willingness of tourists to travel. When considering corporate marketing and promotion plans, tourism companies operating related businesses should increase the weight of their marketing budgets in online marketing, increase investment in online marketing, and develop mobile applications that meet the preferences of Chinese residents in the United States. Do a good job in the timely publication of safety reminders and local information. Safety is an important foundation for tourism development and the core concern of many tourists. Future Research: Due to the important research on the impact of tourism activities, the influencing factors are many and complex, and the psychological process of tourism decision-making is carried out directly. There are still unconsidered factors that need to be studied in depth. In the future, it is possible to compare multiple resource-featured themes, and increase the characteristics of potential tourists, and the factors affecting the selection behavior of regional cultural tourists, and so forth, in order to make the research more applicable and practical instructive significance.

Aim/Purpose: This study seeks to uncover the perceived quality factors of computer-mediated communication in business planning in which communication among teammates is crucial for collaboration. Background: Computer-mediated communication has made communicating with teammates easier and more affordable than ever. What motivates people to use a particular CMC technology during business planning is a major concern in this research. Methodology: This study seeks to address the issues by applying the concept of Information Product Quality (IPQ). Based on 21 factors derived from an extensive literature review on Information Product Quality (IPQ), an experimental study was conducted to identify the factors that are perceived as most relevant. Contribution: The findings in this study will help developers find a more customer-oriented approach to developing CMC technology design, specifically useful in collaborative work, such as business planning. Findings: This study extracted the three specific quality factors to use CMC technology in business planning: informational, physical, and service. Future Research: Future research will shed more light on the generality of these findings. Future studies should be extended to other population and contextual situations in the use of CMC.

Aim/Purpose: There is ample evidence that team processes matter more than the characteristics of individual team members; unfortunately, very few empirical studies have examined communication process variables closely or tied them to team outcomes. Background: The University of Miami Laboratory for Integrated Knowledge (U-LINK) is a pilot funding mechanism that was developed and implemented based on empirically-established best practices established in the literature on the Science of Team Science (SciTS). In addition to addressing grand societal challenges, teams engaged in processes designed to enhance the process of “teaming”. This study uses the Inputs-Mediator-Outputs-Inputs (IMOI) model as a blueprint for an investigation into how team communication processes (shared communication, shared leadership, formal meetings, informal meetings) influence intermediary team processes (goal clarity, role ambiguity, process clarity, trust) and team outcomes (team satisfaction, team productivity). Methodology: Monte Carlo methodologies were used to explore both longitudinal self-report (survey of communication and team outcome variables) data and objective data on scholarly productivity, collected from seventy-eight members of eleven real-world intact interdisciplinary teams to explore how team communication processes affect team outcomes. Contribution: This study is among the few that centers communication practice and processes in the operationalization and measurement of its constructs and which provides a test of hypotheses centered on key questions identified in the literature. Findings: Communication practices are important to team processes and outcomes. Shared communication and informal meetings were associated with increased team satisfaction and increased research productivity. Shared leadership was associated with increased research productivity, as well as improved process and goal clarity. Formal meetings were associated with increased goal clarity and decreased role ambiguity. Recommendation for Researchers: Studying intact interdisciplinary research teams requires innovative methods and clear specification of variables. Challenges associated with access to limited numbers of teams should not preclude engaging in research as each study contributes to our larger body of knowledge of the factors that influence the success of interdisciplinary research teams. Future Research: Future research should examine different team formation and funding mechanisms and extend observation and data collection for longer periods of time.

Aim/Purpose: Labeling a journal as “predatory” can do great damage to the journal and the individuals that have contributed to it. This paper considers whether the predatory classification has outlived its usefulness and what might replace it. Background: With the advent of open access publishing, the term “predatory” has increasingly been used to identify academic journals, conferences, and publishers whose practices are driven by profit or self-interest rather than the advancement of science. Absent clear standards for determining what is predatory and what is not, concerns have been raised about the misuse of the label. Methodology: Mixed methods: A brief review of the literature, some illustrative case studies, and conceptual analysis. Contribution: The paper provides recommendations for reducing the impact of illegitimate journals. Findings: Current predatory classifications are being assigned with little or no systematic research and virtually no accountability. The predatory/not predatory distinction does not accommodate alternative journal missions. Recommendations for Researchers: The distinction between legitimate and illegitimate journals requires consideration of each journal’s mission. To serve as a useful guide, a process akin to that used for accrediting institutions needs to be put in place. Impact on Society: Avoiding unnecessary damage to the careers of researchers starting out. Future Research: Refining the initial classification scheme proposed in the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a model to help explain why ideas about reality differ. Misinformation is an important topic that in the past several years has gained prominence. The author developed a model of informing.

Aim/Purpose. This paper, although conceived earlier than the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic, addresses the problem of informing agility as part of organizational agility that has become a rather important issue for business survival. Background. While the general issues of business informing, and business intelligence (BI) in particular, have been widely researched, the dynamics of informing, their ability to act in accord with changes in business and preserve the key competencies has not been widely researched. In particular, the research on BI agility is rather scattered, and many issues need to be clarified. Methodology. A series of in-depth interviews with BI professionals to determine relations between organizational agility and BI agility, and to round up a set of key factors of BI agility. Contribution. The paper clarifies a candidate set of key factors of BI agility and gives ground for future research in relations with areas like corporate and BI resilience and culture. Findings. The interview results show the relations between organizational changes, and changes in BI activities. BI has limited potential in recognizing important external changes but can be rather helpful in making decision choices and detecting internal problems. Lack of communication between business and IT people, existence of data silos and shadow BI, and general inadequacy of organizational and BI culture are the key factors impairing BI agility. Recommendations for Practitioners. There are practical issues around BI agility that need solving, like the reason-able coverage of standards or creation of a dedicated unit to care about BI potential. Recommendations for Researchers. The research is still in its starting phase, but additional interesting directions start to emerge, like relations between BI agility, resilience and corporate agility, or the role of informing culture and BI culture for BI agility issues. Impact on Society. Agile business, especially in times of global shocks like COVID-19, loses less value and has more chances to survive. Future Research. Most likely this will be focused on the relations between BI agility, resilience, and corporate agility, and the role of informing culture and BI culture for BI agility issues.

Aim/Purpose: The article is designed to contradict the existing opinion that “transdisciplinarity is a marginal direction of contemporary science.” Background: The difficulties of implementing transdisciplinarity into science and education are connected with the fact that its generally accepted definition, identification characteristics, and methodological features are still missing. In order to eliminate these disadvantages of transdisciplinarity, its prime cause and initial idea had to be detected. Then an attempt was made to analyze correspondence of the existing opinions about transdisciplinarity with the content of its prime cause and initial ideas. Methodology: The bibliometric content analysis of the literature reviews on the subject of transdisciplinary was used in order to determine correspondence of the opinions about transdisciplinarity with the meaning of its prime cause and initial ideas, as well as to generalize these opinions. This method allowed detecting and classifying opinions into 11 groups including 39 stereotypes of transdisciplinarity. For substantiation of transdisciplinary approaches consistency with the approaches of the contemporary science C.F. Gauss random variables normal distribution was used. The “Gauss curve” helped to show the place of transdisciplinary and systems transdisciplinary approaches in the structure of academic and systems approaches. The “Gauss curve” demonstrated the step-by-step broadening of the scientific worldview horizon due to sequential intensification of synthesis, integration, unification, and generalization of the disciplinary knowledge. Contribution: Based on rethinking the results from bibliometric content analysis of the literature reviews, the generalized definition of transdisciplinarity could be formulated, as well as the definition for the transdisciplinary and systems transdisciplinary approaches could be given. It was shown that transdisciplinarity is a natural stage for development of contemporary science and education, and the transdisciplinary approaches were capable to suggest the methods and tools to solve the complex and poorly structured problems of science and society. Findings: Many existing stereotypes of transdisciplinarity do not meet its prime cause and initial ideas. Such stereotypes do not have deep philosophic and theoretical substantiation, as well as not suggesting the transdisciplinary methods and tools. Thus, the authors of such stereotypes often claim them to be transdisciplinary or suggest perceiving them as transdisciplinarity. This circumstance contributed to the fact that many disciplinary scientists, practitioners, and initiators of higher education view transdisciplinarity as a marginal direction of contemporary science. Based on the generalized definition of transdisciplinarity, as well as its prime cause and initial ideas, we managed to show that transdisciplinarity is presented in contemporary science in the form of two different approaches: the transdisciplinary approach and the systems transdisciplinary approaches. The objective of the transdisciplinary approach is ensuring science development at the stage of synthesis and integration of disciplinary knowledge. The objective of the systems transdisciplinary approach is ensuring solving of modern society problems using unification and generalization of disciplinary knowledge. Recommendation for Researchers: The researchers should consider that within the limits of the transdisciplinary approach the disciplinary specialists are managed. Within the limits of the systems transdisciplinary approach the disciplinary knowledge is managed. Thus, the transdisciplinary approach is efficient for organization and research with participation of the scientists of complementary disciplines. An example for such research can be a team of researchers of medical disciplines and complimentary disciplines from chemistry, physics, and engineering. The systems transdisciplinary approach is efficient for organization and performance of research with participation of scientists of non-complementary disciplines, for example, economics, physics, meteorology, chemistry, ecology, geology, and sociology. Future Research: In terms of the main initial idea, transdisciplinarity is formed as a global approach. The global approach should have a traditional institutional form: it should be a science discipline (meta-discipline) and have carriers with the transdisciplinary worldview. Training for such carriers can be organized by the universities within the limits of the systems transdisciplinarity departments and Centers of Systems Transdisciplinary Retraining for Disciplinary Specialists. Thus, it is reasonable to initiate discussion for the idea to reform the disciplinary structure of the universities considering creation of such departments and centers.

Table of Contents for Volume 24 of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline, 2021

Aim/Purpose: Nigeria’s university education goes through incessant strikes by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU). This strike has led to shared emotion on micro-blogging sites like Twitter. This study analyzed selected historical tweets from the “ASUU” to understand citizens’ opinions. Background: The researchers conducted sentiment analysis and topic modelling to understand Twitter users’ opinions on the strike. Methodology: The researchers used the Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning (VADER) technique for sentiment analysis, and the Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) was used for topic modelling. A total of 10,000 tweets were first extracted for the study. After data cleaning, 1323 tweets were left. Contribution: To the researcher’s best knowledge, no published study has presented a sentiment analysis on the topic of the ASUU strike using the Twitter dataset. This research will fill this gap by providing a sentiment analysis and drawing out subjects by exploring the tweets on the phrase “ASUU.” Findings: The sentiment analysis result using VADER returned 567 tweets as ‘Negative,’ with the remaining 544 and 212 categorized as Positive and Neutral. The result of the LDA returned six topics, all comprising seven keywords. The topics were the solution to the strike, ASUU strike effect, strike Call-off, appeal to ASUU, student protest and student appeal. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers can use this study’s findings to compare with other contexts of opinion mining. Practitioners may also use the research to understand better the attitudes of their staff and students about the strikes to create actionable solutions before the suspension of the strike. Future Research: Future studies can collect information from other social networking and blogging sites.

Aim/Purpose: Explores the interrelationships between uncertainty, motivation, and IT readiness when predicting IOS adoption among small businesses. Background: Small business IOS adoption is proportionally low in most countries worldwide. Methodology: Uses a sample of small businesses and PLS structural-equations path modelling approach. Contribution: Uncertainty is an underexplored construct in information systems research, and our research shows that it plays a significant role in IOS adoption among small businesses Findings: The findings support that uncertainty has a negative effect on intent to adopt IOS and that motivation and IT readiness have a positive effect. Recommendation for Researchers: To alleviate uncertainty, an effort to win over small business managers to IOS over the internet must encompass accessible information, security provisions, low-cost product, simple interfaces, and system adaptability to existing provisions in the IOS network. The uncertainty perspective has not been tested extensively empirically, especially not in the context of technology adoption, and needs further investigation. Future Research: Future research could explore the uncertainty construct in the context of IOS among different size businesses

Aim/Purpose: Developing Digital Platform Ecosystems (DPE) to transform conventional Knowledge Management Systems (KM/KMS) scenarios promises significant benefits for individuals, institutions, as well as emerging knowledge economies. Background: The academic entrepreneurship project presented is aiming for such a KMS-DPE configuration. Having consolidated this author’s own and external re-search findings, realization is currently commencing with a start-up in a business incubator. Methodology: Design science research applying mixed one-sample case study and illustrative scenario approach focusing on conceptual analysis and entrepreneurship. Contribution: Although (academic) entrepreneurship is a young research area with recently growing interest, publications focusing on this transitional stage between maturing research and projected commercial viability of digital technologies are rare. Findings: A roadmap looking beyond the immediate early-start-up perspective is out-lined by integrating recent development-stage-related DPE-research and by addressing stakeholders diverse informing needs essential for system realization. Recommendations for Practitioners and Researchers: As this transdisciplinary perspective combines KM, informing, design science, and entrepreneurial research spaces, it may assist other researchers and practitioners facing similar circumstances and/or start-up opportunities. Impact on Society: The article advances the understanding of how DPE communities may serve members with highly diverse skills and ambitions better to gainfully utilize the platform’s resources and generative potential in their personal and local settings. Future Research: As the entrepreneurial agenda will complement (not substitute) the academic research, research priorities have been highlighted aligned to three future stages.

Aim/Purpose: This paper examines the impact of the transformational, servant, and paternalistic leadership styles on employee performance at the middle and senior levels. Background: Transdisciplinary research promotes the integration and development of various sciences. It provides more choices for leaders to adopt ways and practical activities to promote enterprise development. Complexity leadership theory emphasizes that effectively functioning organizations need distinct forms of leadership to work together. Leaders rely on different leadership practices in an emergent collaborative context, and finding an optimal balance is challenging. Many scholars have attempted to explore which leadership styles have a more significant impact on employees by distinguishing and defining types of leadership styles and explaining the process by which they influence employee behavior and performance. Various scholars have further explored and empirically demonstrated the impact of these three types of leadership styles (transformational, servant, paternalistic)on employee performance. While transformational and servant leadership have their roots in the West, paternalistic leadership has roots in China. Few scholars have conducted comparative studies on their positive impact on employee performance. How do these three leadership styles affect employee performance at the middle and senior levels in the Chinese context? Which combination of middle and senior leadership styles performs best? These are the second area that this paper will attempt to explore. Methodology: This study constructs a three-tier model at the senior, middle, and grassroots levels. A questionnaire survey was used to collect data. SPSS 22.0 and Amos were used for data analysis. Contribution: Through its construction of a three-tier model (senior, middle, and grassroots levels), the paper explores the combined effect of three leadership styles (transformational, servant, and paternalistic) on grassroots employees. It explores the impact of senior leaders across levels on grassroots employee performance, which is expected to provide a valuable addition to theories on leadership styles. It is also instructive to examine which leadership style performs better and what middle and senior leadership configurations are more conducive to driving beneficial employee behavior and, ultimately, corporate growth. Findings: The transformational, servant, and paternalistic leadership styles, both at the top and middle levels, have a significant positive relationship with employee performance; the middle leadership style plays a positive mediating role between the top leadership style and employee performance. In terms of impact on employee performance, transformational leadership shows the best results at both the top and middle levels, with paternalistic leadership second and servant leadership at the same level. Regarding which middle and senior leadership style pairing is the best, the sample is relatively small, and the gap between various pairing combinations is not evident from the data. If the sample size is enlarged, the coefficient will likely expand year-on-year. Therefore, we can assume that the pairing effect of top servant leadership and middle transformational leadership is the best, top paternalistic leadership and middle transformational leadership is the second-best, and the combination of top paternalistic leadership and middle-level servant leadership leaders is the weakest. Recommendation for Researchers: This paper extends the study of top and middle leadership’s combined effect on employee performance as a positive response to the call for multi-layer or cross-layer analysis in leadership research. The findings further enrich the literature on leadership style-related theories. The middle leadership style plays a positive mediating role between the top leadership style and employee performance. The trickle-down effect is further verified, i.e., the top leadership will have a permeating influence on employees through the middle leadership, and the top’s influence on the middle is generally more significant than the influence on grassroots employees. However, the difference between the influence of the middle leadership on the grassroots and that of the top on the grassroots is not apparent, which is inconsistent with the trickle-down effect that the middle leadership communicates more with the grassroots and has more influence on the grassroots, and further verification is needed. All three types of leaders positively affected employee performance, with the best being transformational leadership, paternalistic leadership, and servant leadership. This finding is consistent with some scholars and inconsistent with some scholars. The interested scholars can do further research. The better performance of diverse pairings in middle and senior leadership combinations is consistent with previous research suggesting that leadership styles have their own strengths and can be complementary. This paper further provides a comparative study of multiple leadership styles to validate the recognition and adaptability of leadership styles and further explain the complex relationship between leadership styles and employee job performance. Scholars can conduct comparative research on other leadership styles, and there may be different results. Future Research: Because of the cross-sectional data taken, the findings’ generalizability still needs further validation. There are many types of leadership styles, and there are other types of leadership styles that can be explored comparatively, perhaps leading to different findings. From another point of view, various leaders have their strengths, and they are not mutually hindering. More research is needed on team formation in a variety of contexts. Organic organizational structure enables knowledge creation and integration through the process of organizational learning through deep and continuous social interaction or dialogue. So we can further examine the influence process of leaders on employees from how to give full play to their advantages, such as improving shared leadership and shared communication.

Aim/Purpose: This paper aimed to explore the impact of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out among the general population during the pandemic. Background: The paper has attempted to explore compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out among the population at large, especially during the pandemic. This area has not been explored as yet. Methodology: A simple random sample of 98 males and 88 females was collected anonymously through a Google form survey. Part A collected demographic data and Part B comprised of 15 statements with 5 each for compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out, adapted from a Compassion Fatigue/Satisfaction Self-Test. ANOVA single factor was employed for the three variables of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out using a 0.05 significance level. Correlations among the variables were also analyzed. Contribution: The present paper contributes to covering the research gap of investigating the presence of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out among the population at large comprising the age group of 18 to 60+ and from different professions. Findings: The findings revealed significant differences in the levels of compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction, and burn-out in the population at large during the pandemic. Future Research: The findings can be further strengthened by extending it to a larger sample size across different nations and, specifically, studying gender differences during such adverse pandemic situations.

Aim/Purpose This paper aims to illustrate, through an exploratory ideographic case study, how a Complex Thinking framework can inform the design of scientific events and the facilitation of scientific Inter and Transdisciplinary groups towards positive emergent outcomes, both at the level of the functioning of the group and the collective complexity of their thinking. Moreover, it aims to show how the choice of facilitation strategies can contribute to positive emergent outcomes in the context of a fully online event, with its inherent constraints. Finally, this study aims to conduct an exploratory qualitative evaluation of the participants’ experiences during School, with a focus on the processes and how they relate to the aims of the School and the goals of the facilitation. Background Science needs to embrace modes of knowing capable of generating more complex (differentiated, integrated, recursively organized, emergent), ecologically fit, and creative responses, to meet the complexity of the world’s challenges. New formats and strategies are required that attend to the facilitation of Inter and Transdisciplinary scientific events and meetings, towards creative and complex outcomes. A Complex Thinking framework provides suggestions for the facilitation of Inter and Transdisciplinary meetings and events through targeting key properties which may lead to the emergence of complex and creative outcomes. Methodology We adopt an ideographic case study approach to illustrate how a complex systems approach, in particular a Complex Thinking framework, grounded in an enactive view of cognition, guided the design choices and the facilitation strategies of an online Inter and Transdisciplinary Advanced Training School (Winter School). We aim to illustrate how the facilitation strategies were selected and used to promote deep and creative interactions within the constraints of an online environment. We adopt an exploratory qualitative approach to investigate the participants’ reports of their experiences of the School, in light of the principles and goals that guided its design and facilitation. Contribution This paper opens a new area of theoretical and applied research, under the scope of a Complex Thinking framework, focused on the facilitation of Inter and Transdisciplinarity at scientific events, meetings, and discussions towards complex and creative outcomes. Findings The results of the exploratory qualitative analysis of the participants’ experiences regarding the event suggest a critical role of its methodology in fostering rich, deep, and constructive interactions, in leading to the emergence of a collective group experience, to the integration of ideas, and in facilitating transformative personal experiences, under the effects of the emergent group processes. It suggests that the strategies employed were successful, anticipating and overcoming the particular constraints of an online event. Recommendations for Practitioners This case study suggests that a Complex Thinking framework can fruitfully guide the design of facilitation strategies and activities for scientific events and meetings, activating a number of key relational processes that contribute to or boost the emergence of positive group experiences and the production and integration of novel ideas. Recommendations for Researchers This study calls for action-oriented and applied research focused on the developmental evaluation of innovations, regarding the facilitation of scientific creativity and integration, within the scope of a Complex Thinking approach. Impact on Society This paper calls for new modes of organization and formats of scientific activities, suggesting that Inter and Transdisciplinary events and meetings may benefit from intentional management and facilitation of interactions between participants to produce transformative impacts. It demonstrates the importance of the organizational principles used to plan and run events that engage multiple and various societal agents, from academics to practitioners and social activists, towards enhancing their richness and relevance to complex real-world challenges. Future Research This study highlights the need for process-focused systematic case study research using complex systems-informed designs to explore how and which facilitation strategies may promote which (interaction of) properties of Complex Thinking and associated processes and how, and under which conditions, these lead to more complex and creative outcomes.

Aim/Purpose: The integration of knowledge through the transdisciplinary method with the three concepts civilization, ideology, and geopolitics (CIG) enables the analysis of international relations in a new perspective and the informing strategists of countries, organizations, analysts, clients, etc. These three concepts express the transdisciplinarity that offers a new theoretical explanation and the informing science approach. Background: The integration of knowledge using the three concepts for the analysis of international relations has found adequate explanations from 1890 until the withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the CIG model theoretically and practically finds support for more than a century, as argued in the paper. Methodology: The present paper uses a mixed theory based on transdisciplinary methodology and informing science. The literature was reviewed to find and build the theoretical basis and provide appropriate examples. The theory is also based on the model used by Francis Fukuyama in his books on building and dissolution of states (middle-range theory). Contribution: This paper enables the rethinking of the limitations of research on a theoretical and practical basis that is done in many scientific circles, not to eliminate others but to enrich science even more. Findings: In the paper, the main findings are the following: Integrating the three CIG concepts according to the transdisciplinary method offers a new perspective to explain international relations using the IS method; The integration of the three concepts is worthwhile after 1980, when the model of cabinet governments falls, Bismarck falls, and public opinion starts to emerge; It was after 1980 that theories of civilization and geopolitics began to emerge along with ideologies to apply in practice; These three concepts offer explanations based on a CIG zone and in the periphery of the CIG zone. In the CIG zone the security sphere is more stable and long-term, while in periphery the cooperation is temporary and not long termed; The paper shows that the Cold War period is divided into two periods; The paper also finds that CIG explains with examples the events that happened after the Cold War and until present days; The paper also shows, based on the strategies of the superpowers, how they are extending their influence based on the CIG concepts. The paper also shows new patterns of cooperation and clashes between the superpowers’ security zones, which also provide an explanatory perspective for the USA withdrawal from Afghanistan. (We do not talk in the paper about the Afghanistan issue and USA withdrawal). Recommendation for Researchers: Scientific attributes in the integration of knowledge give researchers a more open and comprehensive perspective to make more accurate and practical analyses of international relations. According to this model, other theories are enriched that use the transdisciplinary method, IS, and the CIG as a model for the integration of knowledge. Future Research: Researchers and practitioners of this CIG model can find answers such as “Why did the USA fail in Afghanistan and why was it successful in Kosovo?” as well as other questions about finding a solution for Iraq, cooperation with China, etc.

Aim/Purpose: Cyberbullying (CB) is an ongoing phenomenon that affects youth in negative ways. Using online news articles to provide information to schools can help with the development of comprehensive cyberbullying prevention campaigns, and in restoring faith in news reporting. The inclusion of online news also allows for increased awareness of cybersafety issues for youth. Background: CB is an inherent problem of information delivery and security. Textual analysis provides input into prevention and training efforts to combat the issue. Methodology: Text extraction and text analysis methods of term and concept extraction; text link analysis and sentiment analysis are performed on a body of news articles. Contribution: News articles are determined to be a major source of information for comprehensive cyberbullying prevention campaigns. Findings: Online news articles are relatively neutral in their sentiment; terms and topic extraction provide fertile ground for information presentation and context. Recommendation for Researchers: Researchers should seek support for research projects that extract timely information from online news articles. Future Research: Refinement of the terms and topics analytic model, as well as a system development approach for information extraction of online CB news.

Aim/Purpose: A literature review is often criticized for the absence of coherent construction, synthesis of topics, and well-reasoned analysis. A framework is needed for novice researchers to organize and present information obtained from the literature review. Background: Information and communication technologies advancement have yielded overwhelming information. The massive availability of information poses several challenges, including storage, processing, meaningful organization, and presentation for future consumption. Information System Researchers have developed frameworks, guidelines, and tools for gathering, filtering, processing, storing, and organizing information. Interestingly, information system researchers have vast information that needs meaningful organization and presentation to the research fraternity while conducting a literature review on a research topic. Methodology: This paper describes a framework called LACTiC (Location, Author, Continuum, Time, and Category) that we adapted from another framework called LATCH (Location, Alphabetical, Time, Category, and Hierarchy). LATCH was used to organize and present information on e-commerce websites for seamless navigation. We evaluated the LACTiC framework. Contribution: Information System Researchers can use the LACTiC framework to organize information obtained from literature review. Findings: The evaluation reveals that most researchers from information systems organize information obtained from the literature review category-wise, followed by continuum, author, time, and location. Recommendation for Researchers: Overall, the framework works well and can be helpful for researchers for an initial idea for organizing information obtained from the literature review. Future Research: To conceptualize the framework, the study was carried out using Information Systems related literature. To generalize the proposed framework, we may suggest that the study can be extended to other areas of business management, such as marketing, finance, operation, decision sciences, accounting, and economics.