Dissertation Competition

Chairs

Eric Monteiro
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Ulrike Schultze
Southern Methodist University

Call for Nominations

The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) invites nominations for the ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition 2016. We look for outstanding doctoral dissertations around the globe in the field of information systems that have been completed in the time period from July 1, 2015, to June 30, 2016. The competition is sponsored by SIGMIS, the ACM Special Interest Group on MIS.

Nominations should be submitted no earlier than midnight UTC, July 10, 2016, and no later than 5pm UTC, July 31, 2016. The candidate’s Ph.D. advisor or department chair should submit the nomination. Only one nomination can be made from an institution.

The ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Competition 2016 is chaired by Eric Monteiro and Ulrike Schultze. The judges include the faculty who participated at the ICIS 2015 doctoral consortium and possibly other faculty members from the discipline who would be appropriate given the content of the submissions.

Questions about this competition may be addressed to the co-chairs.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the 2016 competition, dissertations must have been completed in the time period from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016. Authors must have successfully defended their dissertations and should have received the final approval and all required sign-offs on their dissertation document by the June 30, 2016 date. The author should have earned their PhD in Information Systems, and the dissertation needs to address an important issue in the field of IS. Dissertations that are not related to information systems phenomena will not be considered.

Works under consideration for publication may be submitted if they otherwise meet the submission criteria. Authors will retain full copyright of the submitted papers and dissertations.

Submission Process

All papers and supporting documents must be received 5pm UTC, on July 31, 2016. Any documents received after that date, and/or submissions without all of the appropriate documentation, will not be reviewed.

ICIS encourages submissions from different countries. However, the language of all submitted materials must be English. The following 3 items of documentation are required and they must be submitted as a single “zip” file:

  • A paper derived from the dissertation. If the dissertation consists of several essays, the paper should tie the essays in a coherent manner. The paper should be:
    • Single-authored (i.e., the paper must be written by the student);
    • Absolutely no more than 4,000 words in length, excluding the cover page, tables, graphs, references, and an abstract of no more than 200 words in length;
    • Formatted according to the MIS Quarterly manuscript guidelines;
    • Written in English;
    • Preceded by a cover page that includes a title and the student’s name, institution, and email address.
  • The complete dissertation.
  • A letter from the student’s dissertation advisor or department chair. The letter should attest that: the paper is based on the student’s dissertation; the dissertation has met all requirements for graduation with a doctoral degree and has been successfully completed during the time period from July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016; the paper and the dissertation are regarded by the dissertation committee as being representative of the best level of their department’s doctoral work; the paper derived from the dissertation meets the following criteria: the paper is the work of the student under the guidance of the thesis supervisor (s) (name (s)); it represents high research standards, in terms of theory and methodology; it makes an original and substantive contribution to the understanding, development, or use of information systems.

Submission Instructions

  • The candidate’s Ph.D. advisor or department chair should submit the nomination.
  • All three items must be submitted as a single package in the form of a zip (compressed) file. Name the zip file “Candidate’sFirstName_LastName“. Email the zip file to the following address: phdaward2016@gmail.com (Please note that this has a limit of 10MB as the maximum attachment size per email. Only in the case your zip file is larger than 10MB, you may break the submission package in two separate zip files and send two emails). If you do not receive a confirmation of receipt by August 5, 2016, please send a query to the co-chairs Eric Monteiro and Ulrike Schultze. Please put in the subject line “Candidate’sFirstName_LastName DISSERTATION AWARD SUBMISSION”.
  • The package should be received before 5pm UTC, July 31, 2016. Late arrivals will not be considered.
  • Receipt of electronic materials will be acknowledged by email by the co-chairs or their assistant.

Reviewing Process and Announcement of Winners

A panel of judges, consisting of the ICIS 2015 doctoral consortium faculty and possibly some other IS faculty, will review each submitted application. Their evaluations will be used to select those papers that merit more detailed assessment as final candidates for the award. The papers and dissertations of the finalists will be reviewed by a few members of the review panel, who will make the final selection. As this is an award competition, no reviews will be provided to the candidates or the nominators.

The winner of the dissertation award competition will be announced in December 2016 at ICIS in Dublin, Ireland. There will be no individual notification of the status of any candidate until the official announcement in December.