How to write a scientific paper?

1. How to write a scientific paper? Sjaak Brinkkemper MBI Colloquium

2. Outline • Compose your message • Finding an outlet • Structure of Design Science papers • Structure of Quantitative Research papers • Rules of the game • Results so far

3. 1. Compose your message • What is new? What was not known, and is known now? • A paper is not a summary of your thesis Select the best parts of your research findings • What position statement do you want to make? Formulate a one sentence position statement • RICE test • Rigour: show that the research process is adequately and thoroughly performed • Interesting: the results are appealing for a wide audience • Contribution: significant and valuable addition to knowledge • Exposition: explain everything in a logical and clear manner

4. 2. Finding an outlet • See the upcoming calls pages of www.isworld.org and http://delicious.com/marcorene/conferences • Conferences: www.isworld.org/forthcoming/conferencecfp.asp • Journals and book chapters: www.isworld.org/forthcoming/jourchapcfp.asp  Consult your supervisor  Discuss an outlet at about half or 2/3rd of your project  Informatie (in Dutch) is very positive towards MSc thesis summaries

5. Select an outlet Level • Workshop: 30 – 50 submission with 50% acceptance rate • Conference: 100 – 500 submissions with a 10-25% acceptance rate • Journal: 30% acceptance rate with long lead times Subject • Narrow: Web Information Systems Modeling • Medium: Business Process Management • Broad: Information Systems Region • National • European, Americas, Asia, Australia, Nordic • Worldwide  The higher the more competitive  For students it is most successful to focus on a narrow focussed European workshop

6. Popular journals Professional journals covering MBI subjects • Informatie • Computable • ComputerWorld • AutomatiseringsGids • IT Executive • CIO Magazine • Outsourcing magazine • Intellectueel Kapitaal (Knowledge Management) • English journals are to be identified.

7. 3. Structure of design science papers Abstract • Introduction with a good title to scope the paper • Key contribution • Elaboration of the research • in a convenient chapter structure • … • Conclusions and further research Acknowledgements References

8. Focus the paper • Focus on the main interesting results first! • Start with the main message in section 2 • Elaborate in the next sections • Note: different for quantitative papers

9. IS Research Framework [from Hevner et al. 2005]

10. Title • Descriptive title covering the domain and the contribution • Nice alliterations or paraphrasing of proverbs • “Maturity Matters” • “Useful but Unused” • “Turning the Ugly Duckling into a Swan” • No punctuation, except for : for subtitle • No unknown acronyms

11. Abstract • First sentence is problem statement • One sentence per chapter • Some overall conclusion at the end to position the conclusion • Do not oversell your contribution • Choose keywords known in the domain and from the list of topics in the Call for Papers

12. Introduction • Give Introduction a good title to scope the paper, e.g. • Introduction: Software Supply Networks • Problem description with some published evidence (collect continuously! Not again the Chaos report) • Literature perspective with related work • Main research question • Main contribution of the paper • Outline of the paper • Sometimes Related Work is a separate chapter

13. Chapters 2, 3 and ff • Key contribution • The design artefact • Proper explanation • Adhere to the customs in the area • With examples • Meta-models • Formal mathematics • Be aware that many papers have suggested similar designs • What makes your solution different? • Other chapters explain design artefact • Overall method with steps • Further explanation of details • Case study/ies with examples

14. Conclusions Conclusions and further/future research • Major findings: some kind of summary without being a summary • Limitations of the study, be honest • Some outlook of the usage • Some speculations, but not overselling • Future research • Try to avoid references, especially to future work of yourself in this chapter, unless it has been finalized.

15. 4. Structure of quantitative research papers • Introduction • Problem statement, research question • Theory • Existing knowledge • The model, framework, hypothesis • Data collection • Measurement and validation • Analysis • Conclusion and evaluation Title and abstract are similar as for Design Science papers

16. Trigger

17. Customer Strategy CUSTOMERS Channels RETAIL WEB PAGER/PDA/CELL FACE-to-FACE MAIL/FAX PHONE Customer Operations Customer Value Mngt Business Structure Human Perf Mngt (Customer Interaction Centers, Retail Operations, Field Operations) Personalization Customer Interactions Differentiated Service Needs Assessment Content/Scripting Management Integrated Customer Data Customer Understanding Strategic Profiling Relationship / Integrated and Analysis Campaign Mgmt Data Sourcing Data Models Customer Insight Customer Insight Data Modeling Preprocessing Integration Architecture Hosting Infrastructure (Networking & Servers) What is CRM?

18. Monitoring & Control Strategy & Policy Organization & Processes Information Technology People & Culture Theory Provide an adequate theory. Should be in your MSc thesis already!!

19. Model and hypothesis Alignment Alignment Alignment Alignment • CRM PERFORMANCE • Customer Satisfaction • Customer Retention • Effective route to market

20. Data collection • 3 Experts Meetings • 31 respondents of 30 organisations • Between 10 and 10.000 fte • All sectors • On-line questionniare • Group discussion meeting

21. Analysis (tabular)

22. Analysis (figure)

23. Discussion and conclusions Conclusions: See Design Science paper

24. 5. Rules of the game • The supervisors of both the academic side as well as the organisation side are invited as co-authors Even when they will not write any texts • They have been helpful in arranging the research environment, in establishing good research questions, and providing suggestions. • Co-authorship makes friends! But never put a name without asking! • The department of Information and Computing Sciences will not pay for a trip of students The O&I group pays for the trip of the student or alumnus for papers accepted at a conference or workshop in Europe

25. Papers, grade, and CV • A completed scientific paper is required to score an 8 or more for your graduation thesis project • Students heading towards a 6 or 7 should aim at writing an article for popular ICT journal • List papers on your CV

26. 6. Results so far • So far 58 MBI students have published 78 papers with their co-authors See: www.cs.uu.nl/groups/OI/index.php?id=2&subid=2 • MBI is the largest ICT master in the Netherlands • “MBI educates students at an international research level” (Educational certification committee, January 2007)

27. Statistics Category Number Percentage Students 118 100 Students with no paper 60 50.8 Students with one paper 42 35.6 Students with multiple papers 16 13.6 Total papers 78 100 Paper in preparation or submitted 9 11.6 Workshop paper 14 17.9 Conference paper 38 48.7 Journal paper or book chapter 17 21.8

28. Some hard work, but then … • Writing a scientific paper is very rewarding! • Get yourself listed in scholar.google.com • Get citations!

29. Questions? Good luck and have fun!