Don't Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater: Comments on "Recent Developments in PLS"

Evermann and Rönkkö (2023) overview recent advances in PLS, and while they describe some advances with several useful recommendations, we argue that they do not fully deliver on their paper's promise. In this response, we argue that their position presents an unbalanced view and ignores several methodological advances that IS scholars have made. Further, several studies that highlight PLS's shortcomings seem to be based on specially designed cases that do not necessarily represent how researchers typically use PLS. In our response, we call for a more balanced debate that considers different perspectives and for researchers to examine PLS's performance in a fair manner. While we do not disagree with Evermann and Rönkkö's (2023) recommendations, factors such as insufficient tool support challenge efforts to implement them, and we observe that, besides scholars using PLS, editors and reviewers also have a responsibility to recognize methodological advances. We commend Evermann and Rönkkö (2023) for their efforts in studying PLS's limitations, which have spurred several methodological advances, but we also caution that we should not “throw the baby out with the bathwater” by discarding PLS due to its known limitations.