Administrivia 🧐

IT as a Service Enabler (ITSE)

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

February 29, 2024

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:

• Effort: 5 ECTS (approx. 120 h)
• Language of the paper: English
• Template for the final paper: see here
• Deadline: see Table 1

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

• Kick-off (for date see Table 1)
• Review #1 (literature set, data analysis approach)
• Review #2 (findings)
• Interim presentation (for date see Table 1)
• Review #3 (paper draft)

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
  • Senior Scholars’ Basket of Journals
  • A-ranked Journals in the VHB-JOURQUAL3 ranking
• 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

Table 1: Schedule summer term 2024 (may be subjected to changes)

References

Footnotes

1. Practitioner papers and web-sources are only valid for empirical papers using secondary sources (e.g., desk research)