Trust

Trust is the enabler of social interaction. Although the origins of research on trust traditionally lie outside the Information Systems (IS) domain, the importance of trust for IS research rapidly grew in the late 1990s, and it is still growing with the increasing ubiquity and advancement of technology in organizations, virtual teams, online markets, and user-technology interactions. Theoretically, the central role of trust is tied to the growing social change that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has always created, a trend increased by the introduction of electronic commerce, and with it the need to interact and commerce with total strangers. This trend is mirrored in major IS research fields, such as virtual teams and technology acceptance, and thus also naturally in the pages of MIS Quarterly. The importance of trust for IS research and its impact on the IS literature are also reflected by the fact that a trust-related paper (Gefen et al. 2003) is among the most highly cited articles published in MIS Quarterly, together with papers on TAM, knowledge management, and design science. Besides, two trust-related papers have won the MIS Quarterly Paper of the Year Award in 1998 (Kumar et al. 1998) and 2009, respectively (Cyr et al. 2009), and a Special Issue on trust was published in 2010 (Benbasat et al. 2010). Coupled with the facts that we have identified 33 papers relevant for this curation, and that these papers account for about 20,000 total citations, it is perhaps safe to argue that trust is one of the popular and well-cited areas of research in the IS literature, especially during the last 20 years.