Topic outline

  • Welcome to Scientific reading and writing in ISS. This is an advanced course aimed at Aalto ISM PhD students. The course has two main objectives. First, the course familiarizes the students with the conventions of examining and critically evaluating academic texts. Second, the course helps in outlining the steps required to produce a thorough literature review. To achieve these goals, there will be four lecture sessions organized during Fall 2020 and Spring 2021. These sessions will be held on Tuesday afternoons at 13-16. The dates are October 27th, November 17th, December 8th, February 9th. Contact Esko Penttinen by e-mail at esko.penttinen@aalto.fi if you wish to join the course.

    During the course, the students will deliver two main individual assignments. The first assignment is a review of a manuscript that was submitted to a leading IS journal. After having completed the review of the initial submitted manuscript, the student will then be given the actual review received from the journal containing the senior editor (SE), associate editor (AE), and three anonymous reviewers' comments. The learning objective here is to critically reflect the essential issues to be covered in a review. A secondary learning objective of the assignment is to understand how the paper evolved from a conference publication to a premier IS journal publication. The second assignment is a literature review on the student's own topic. This assignment aims at producing a self-standing research paper that can then be submitted to a workshop or a conference. To pass the course, the student needs to deliver both assignments.