Purpose The purpose of this study is to review topic and survey methodological trends in 'The Journal of Information Systems' in order to present the practical guidelines for the future IS research. By attempting to conduct a meta-analysis on both topic and survey methodological trends, this study could provide researchers wishing to pursue this line of work further with what can be done to improve IS disciplines. Design/methodology/approach In this study, we have reviewed 185 papers that were published in 'The Journal of Information Systems' from 2010 to 2018 and classified them based on topics studied and survey methodologies used. The classification guidelines, which was developed by Palvia et al.(2015), has been used to capture the topic trends. We have also employed Struab et al.(2004)s' guidelines for securing rigor of validation issues. By using two guidelines, this study could also present topic and rigor trends in 'The Journal of Information Systems' and compare them to those trends in International Journals. Findings Our findings have identified dominant research topics in 'The Journal of Information Systems'; 1) social media and social computing, 2) IS usage and adoption, 3) mobile computing, 4) electronic commerce/business, 5) security and privacy, 6) supply chain management, 7) innovation, 8) knowledge management, and 9) IS management and planning. This study also could offer researchers who pursue this line of work further practical guidelines on mandatory (convergent and discriminant validity, reliability, and statistical conclusion validity), highly recommended (common method bias testing), and optional validations (measurement invariance testing for subgroup analysis, bootstrapping methods for testing mediating effects).