Theses
Theses
During a period of about 3 months (bachelor) or 6 months (master), students prove that they are able to self-suffiently write an academic thesis on a current topic of management information systems. In the following, we shed light into how students can write their thesis at the chair of information systems and sustainable supply chain management.
Where to start and how to choose a topic?
Subject to remaining capacities, we supervise bachelor's and master's theses on our research topics. You can either formulate your own initial proposals related to the general topics mentioned on our websites.
First, we ask students to contact professor Rothe or a research associate of the chair to ask for available capacities and narrow down a topic of interest. Once, a topic of interest has been found, students formulate a 2-page exposé on their topic.
How should the exposé look like?
Exposé's have a typical length of 1-2 pages, consisting research motivation (either problematization or research gap), research question, and research methodology. Writing and iterating an exposé may take 2-6 weeks.
How to write a thesis?
The formal requirements for the structure and design of qualification theses are set out in a Leitfaden zur Erstellung wissenschaftlicher Arbeiten in der Wirtschaftsinformatik (German, English version follows). Around half time of their thesis editing time, we expect students to hand-in a structure of their work (main headlines with approximated page numbers) to have a half time consultation with their supervisor.
Where do I find literature?
In general, we suggest that you conduct a fair literature review on the topic of interest. Ideally, students find central articles while producing their exposé, and engage in a representative literature search during their thesis development.
Conducting a literature review is easier than it sounds. We shed light on how to do this, in a short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NmDlsy_Igw (German, English follows)
Moreover, literature can be found in various databases. Either way, we strongly advise students to make sure that their literature search covers leading journals. This includes journals in information systems (AIS Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals), and management journals, including but not limited to:
- European Journal of Information Systems
- Information Systems Journal
- Information Systems Research
- Journal of AIS
- Journal of Information Technology
- Journal of MIS
- Journal of Strategic Information Systems
- MIS Quarterly
- Information & Organization
- Organization Science
- Strategic Management Journal
- Administrative Science Quarterly
- Management Science
Literature can be found in the following databases:
| Library | Description |
| AIS eLibrary | Digital library of AIS publications (most Senior Basket journals included), full text only partly possible, upon request the supervisor can provide individual articles |
| ACM Digital Library | Digital library of ACM publications, full-text access at university computers |
| IEEE Digital Library | Digital library of IEEE publications, full text access generally not possible |
| Wirtschaftsinformatik | Academic journal on business informatics, upon request the supervisor can provide individual articles |
| Scientific Literature Digital Library (CiteSeer) | Database of publications in computer science and information sciences, full texts are usually linked and freely available. |
| Computer Science Bibliography | Bibliography of publications in computer science, provided by the University of Trier, without full texts. |
| EBSCOhost | US database provider with literature database that covers many management journals, includes full-text databases |
| JSTOR | Digital library for journals, books and primary literature; full-text access available on university computers |
| SpringerLink | Online library for science, technology and medicine |