General remarks
The aspiration of working on one of my topics should be to produce a solid scientific paper (good chance to prepare for the bachelor thesis)
This requires you to work according to scientific standards (“good practices”) and, e.g., not to shift work to LLMs.
Important notes:
Topics
For more details on the topics, please see topics
- Cyber security for industrial IoT (IIoT) (structured literature review)
- Gamification as a strategy to promote sustainable behavior (structured literature review)
- Models of human-AI collaboration in decision-making (structured literature review)
For detailed requirements and evaluation criteria see evaluation criteria
Formalities
Seminar paper
Please use this template
- The paper should be at least 10 pages long and must not exceed 15 pages (per student, excluding references)
- The paper must be uploaded as PDF in Moodle (deadline announced on moodle)
Meetings
You must attend at least the following meetings
You are responsible for arranging the meetings (except the kick-off and the interim presentation) via calendly.
Paper structure
Please follow this generic structure (level 1), sub-sections can be defined individually.
You do neither need to add a table of contents nor a list of figures.
Introduction
- Motivation (relevance, research gap)
- Research question
Theoretical Background
- Substantiation of the research gap
- Introduction of the main theoretical concepts
Method
- Presentation of the approach to data collection and analysis (how did you proceed, i.e., how have you conducted th structured literature review)
Findings
Descriptive results of the data analysis (“this is what we found out”). (for literature reviews: concept-centric presentation, not author-based)
- It only contains a description of findings (factual result reporting, past tense)
- It does not include a discussion or interpretation of the findings
Discussion
- The answers to the research questions are presented and discussed
- Evaluation of the findings considering existing literature (usually the literature discussed in the background section)
- Elaboration of theoretical and practical contributions of your work (e.g., what can be learned from your work on a theoretical and practical level)
- Limitations and further research
Evaluation
The final paper is graded based on following criteria
- Originality (passing criterion)
- The paper complies with the rules of good scientific practice, plagiarism will not be accepted.
- Logic & consistency (80%)
- The red thread of the paper and the scientific approach is clearly recognizable and logically comprehensible.
- The topic is clearly outlined and motivated in the introduction
- The research question is explicitly stated
- All core terms are introduced and clearly defined
- The background/state of research is sufficiently substantiated
- Data collection and analysis methods are clearly outlined and correctly applied
- The results are comprehensible and offer novel answers to the research question
- The findings are critically discussed (contributions, implications for practice, own thoughts; literature is used)
- Composition and formalities (20%)
- The paper follows scientific standards concering literature use, structure and language.
- A sufficient amount of predominantly scientific literature is used (peer-reviewed articles)
- Literature is correctly and consistently cited
- Works is well structured (length and balance of chapters) and formal requirements are fulfilled (grammar, spelling, formatting)
- The argumentation is well comprehensible (linguistic stylistics)
Jump start
Your first task: get to know the literature (what is already known)
Focus on scientific literature (peer-reviewed, high quality)
- Only scientific papers that are peer-reviewed
- Concerning the theoretical part: no practitioner papers (e.g., white papers from consulting firms), no books, not web-sources, etc. 1
- Recommendation is to focus the search on high-quality IS journals, such as
- Use Web of Science or the journals’ archives to search for literature
- Use EndNote to organize your literature
Next steps
- Work through the literature review materials on Moodle
- Explore your topic; identify key papers and extract definitions for the main concepts
- Start your (structured) literature search (i.e., use my queries)
- Get the full-texts of the identified articles
- Organize the literature in EndNote
- Start reading articles, begin with the two that are cited mostly
- Write down what you have learned for your study (e.g., definitions, concepts, mechanisms)
- Write down your questions for our next session
- Arrange an appointment to discuss your literature and/or approach
Schedule
When | What | Where |
---|---|---|
02.04.24, 2 pm |
Kick-off meeting | A.1.58 |
04.06.24, 5 pm |
Interim presentations | E5.1.09 |
01.07.24, 8 pm |
Deadline paper submission | Moodle |
References
Footnotes
Practitioner papers and web-sources are only valid for empirical papers using secondary sources (e.g., desk research)↩︎