New Jersey Institute of Technology College of Computing Sciences CIS677: Information System Principles, Spring 2002 Professors Bieber and Jacoby
A Public Research University

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Assignment: Individual & Mentoring Article Reviews

You will be writing two individual article reviews this semester. In addition, the distance sections will participate in mentoring teams, which will have to write two mentoring article reviews.

Goal:

To give you experience in reading critically, and in writing a critical article review.

• Individual Article Review Assignment (All Sections)
• Mentoring Article Review Assignment (Distance Sections only)

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Individual Article Reviews:

Due Dates:

• register your articles for approval: by 2/28 and 3/14
• full reviews: 3/14 and 4/11

(1) Pick an article.

Pick an interesting professional article from the IS professional journals or refereed conferences. ("Refereed" means that the article has been formally reviewed and recommended by a group of peer researchers.)

These include MIS Quarterly, Journal of MIS, Decision Sciences, Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Research, ACM Computing Surveys, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, Communications of the ACM, etc.

See the journal pages at http://catt.bus.okstate.edu/isworld/journal2.htm

Also valid are refereed conference proceedings such as the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science (HICSS).

The following are *not* acceptable sources:

• the trade press such as Computerworld, Information Week, Business Week, etc.
• technical reports
• non-refereed articles found on the World Wide Web.
• non-refereed or lightly-refereed conference articles.

Also, please note:

• Your article must be at least 8 pages of tight text, so short articles are not acceptable.
• You may not use articles read in your other classes.
• Only one person may review an article. Articles already chosen will be posted in the "Individual Article Review Approval" conference (as part of article registration - step 2 below). You must do a search in WebBoard for your article's title to ensure that no one else has requested it yet.

(2) Request Approval for Your Article

Please enter your article's full bibliographic reference in the "Individual Article Review Approval" conference on WebBoard. The bibliographic reference is the authors, title, journal name, volume, issue, year, page numbers, etc. for your proposed article. Important: this is not the bibliography listed at the end of the article, rather the citation that someone else would use for your article.

Important: The topic for your article review approval comment *must* be your last name (or first and last name). Otherwise you will never find your comment again in the long list of requests and approvals.

Also, for on-campus sections, please give your professor:

• a copy of the proposed article or its abstract in class, or email this
• put your name on the article and write "proposed article for the individual article review"
• include the article's full bibliographic reference (authors, title, journal name, issue, year, page numbers), etc. Write any missing information on the copy you give us, if all of this information is not there already.

(3) Wait for Approval

Your professor will approve the article in the WebBoard conference by replying to your entry.

(4) Do the Review

Review the article using the article review guidelines.

As the article review guidelines will note, you should conduct a citation analysis for your article. Citation analysis guidelines and a handout are also posted on the course home page.

Those in the distance sections may want to do this citation analysis at the same time as your mentoring article, so you only make one trip to the library. In fact, if you plan it well, you would only have to go to a library for the citation analysis one time during the semester. The distance section mentoring teams need to do a citation analysis for their two mentoring articles. And everyone needs to do a citation analysis for their two individual articles. If you plan this well, then you could do all of these in a single trip.

Note that you should be able to do the citation analysis at the library of any major university. Just phone the reference desk ahead to ensure they have a citation analysis service, either in book form, or preferably on-line.

Also note that the citation indexes are somewhat behind timewise. If your article is less than a year or so old you won't find any citations in the indexes and you should rely on the Internet only. (The delay arises because it takes a while for an author to read an article, incorporate into his or her research, have that research published, and then have the publication indexed in the citation indexes. It's more instantaneous when people put drafts up on the Internet.)

Please pay close attention to the copying/plagiarism note on the course home page. Be sure to cite any works in the way described there.

(5) Submit the Review

You need to submit your review three times: once on-line, one paper copy, and once as a plagiarism check to turnitin.com.

1. On-line: Post your article review in the "Individual Article Final Submission" WebBoard conference as an HTML document.
2. Paper Copy: Turn in a printed copy of your review and a copy of the article itself, (if you didn't originally) to your professor. On-campus students should do this in class. Distance students should follow the submission instructions on the course home page.
3. Turnitin.com: Submit each individual article review to turnitin.com. Use the category "Individual Article Review #1" or "Individual Article Review #2." Details about turnitin.com are posted on the course Web site.

Mentoring Article Reviews (Distance Sections only)

Due Dates:

Mentoring article reviews are due by the Thursday two weeks after your mentoring week ends. For example, the Decision Making team presents during the week of 3/7-3/14, and their reviews are due on 3/28.

*** This is part of the mentoring team's duties, described in the mentoring assignment.

(1) Write a Full Review

Write a full review for each of the two assigned articles that your mentoring team presents during your assigned week.

Follow the article review guidelines posted on the class Web site.

You can choose:

• to divide your team in two subgroups and have each subgroup do one review: In this case, put only the names of the subgroup on each review. Each team member will receive the grade of their subgroup's review only.
• to have everyone work on both reviews: In this case, put everyone's name on both reviews. Each team member will receive the average grade of both reviews.

(2) Submit the Review

Please turn in a printed copy of your review, with *only* the names of the team members who will get graded for that review.

You need to submit your review three times: once on-line, one paper copy, and once as a plagiarism check to turnitin.com.

1. On-line: Post your article review in the "Mentoring Article Final Submission" WebBoard conference as an HTML document.
2. Paper Copy: Turn in a printed copy of your review. Follow the submission instructions on the course home page.
3. Turnitin.com: Submit each article review to turnitin.com. Use the category "Mentoring Article Review #1" and/or "Mentoring Article Review #2." Details about turnitin.com are posted on the course Web site.

This page: http://ccsweb.njit.edu/~bieber/CIS677S02/review.html
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