Classifying DSS Research – A Theoretical Framework

The domain of decision support systems (DSS), focusing on developing various systems to aid decision-making, is receiving increasing attention. The proliferation of the domain necessitates a more comprehensive categorization of DSS research towards a unified representation that can contribute to a shared understanding. We thereby resort to re-examining the DSS research to assimilate, unveil, and re-structure the DSS scholarship. We perform an automated content analysis of the abstracts to investigate the structural commonalities of the DSS articles featuring in the Scopus database and published in the last five decades. Furthermore, we supplement our findings by exploring and classifying the emergent sub-structures. For this, we resort to the scenario classification framework, which draws from information systems, human-computer interaction, and requirements engineering domains, and adapt it in the context of DSS. Our overall results led to a framework for classifying DSS research with four levels: decision environment, DS (decision support) artifact, DS application, and context. We show the framework’s applicability by systematically classifying a sample of publications shortlisted to demonstrate its usefulness.