Information Systems Department College of Computing Sciences New Jersey Institute of Technology CIS677-102/4: Information Systems Principles, Spring 2005 Professor Bieber

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Assignment: Individual Article Reviews

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

Due Dates:

• Article #1: register your article for approval by 2/8; full review & article due 2/22
• Article #2: register your article for approval by 3/22; full review & article due 4/5

*** If you register your article earlier, I can approve it earlier and you can get an earlier start!

(1) Pick an article on Information Systems

Pick an interesting published article about something to do with information systems. The article must be published within the last 12 months.

Topics could include any of those covered in our text, for example, which concerns IS in general and to do with businesses. Of course IS also includes the application of information and computer technologies (ICTs) to non-business domains so you could consider this breadth as well.) Choose your article from one of the following types of sources. Most will be in the on-line databases in the NJIT Library.

(a) The IS/IT professional and trade press and other good magazines, such as CIO Magazine, Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Computerworld, Information Week, Business Week, Scientific American, etc. (as long as the article is long enough)

(b) general research-oriented journals, such as Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer, etc.

(c) rigorous IS academic/research-oriented 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 Digital Information, Journal of Strategic Information Systems, etc. See the IS World journal pages.

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

Also, please note:

• Unpublished articles are not acceptable. Similarly, just because you find a reading on the Web, you cannot assume it has been published. If you cannot find the bibliographic citation to the article in a journal, magazine, newspaper or conference, then do not use that article. On-line journals are acceptable.
• Your article must be at least 4 pages of tight text, so very 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.
• You can not choose an article reviewed in a prior semester of CIS 677.

(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.

Attach a copy of the article to your WebBoard posting, if that is convenient.

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.

(3) Wait for Approval

The 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 on the course Web site.

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 & Article Copy

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

1. On-line: Post your article review in the "Individual Article Final Submission" WebBoard conference as a PDF or HTML document (to eliminate the possibility of viruses; note that you can save a MS Word document as HTML).
2. Paper Copy: Turn in a printed copy of your review and a copy of the article itself, to your professor.
3. Turnitin.com: Submit each individual article review (in HTML, text or MS Word) 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. (If you have trouble posting your review, then open it, copy the text, and paste the text in.)