How to Identify your Design Science Research Artifact

Design Science Research (DSR) is about the development and investigation of artifacts in context. However, in many articles that subscribe to a DSR approach, the artifact is not clearly classified and identified. Very little attention has been given in the DSR literature on this topic, so guidelines are lacking. Based on artifact ontology, this paper proposes guidelines for design researchers in the IS domain on how to specify both the artifact and the research objective. For validation, the guidelines have been applied to a range of DSR papers. Our results show that the artifact definition guidelines can add to the precision of the research object specification.