ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award

The International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) invites nominations for the ACM SIGMIS Doctoral Dissertation Award Competition 2021. We are seeking outstanding doctoral dissertations from around the globe in the field of Information Systems that have been completed in the time period from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021. The competition is sponsored by SIGMIS, the ACM Special Interest Group on MIS.

Nominations should be submitted no earlier than midnight September 15, 2021, and later than midnight (UTC -7), October 1, 2021. 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 is chaired by Sue Brown, Kai Lim, and Maung Sein, and the judges include the faculty members who participated at the ICIS 2020 doctoral consortium and 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 2021 competition, dissertations must have been completed in the time period from July 1, 2020, to June 30, 2021. Authors must have successfully defended their dissertations and should have received the final approval and all required sign-offs on their dissertation document by June 30, 2021. The author should have earned their Ph.D. 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

ICIS encourages submissions from different countries. However, the language of all submitted materials must be English. The following 3 items of documentation are required:

  • A paper derived from the dissertation. The initial screening of submissions will be based on a purposefully written paper designed to highlight the significance and contribution of the research. If the dissertation consists of several essays, the paper should tie the essays in a coherent manner. The paper is expected to cover the whole dissertation research and should address:
    (i) the rationale for the dissertation,
    (ii) the research objective / questions,
    (iii) theoretical development and hypotheses, as appropriate,
    (iv) overview and justification of the research design and methodology,
    (v) key findings, and
    (vi) discussion of the contribution and implications of the research. Submissions where the paper only covers part of the dissertation research or is one of several essays from the dissertation will not be considered. 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;
    • 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, 2020 to June 30, 2021; 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.

Submissions should adhere to the following guidelines:

  • The candidate’s Ph.D. advisor or department chair should submit the nomination.
  • All three items must be submitted to the online form as a single submission using the link at the bottom of this page.
  • The package should be received before 5pm (UTC -7), October 1,  2021. Late arrivals will not be considered.

Reviewing Process and the Announcement of Winners

A panel of judges, consisting of the ICIS 2020 doctoral consortium Faculty and possibly some other IS Faculty, will review each submitted application. The initial evaluation of the dissertation will be based on the paper derived from the work (as detailed above). The key evaluation criteria will be the significance of the issue being investigated and the contribution of the research undertaken. This evaluation will be used to select those submissions that merit a more detailed assessment as finalists for the award.

The overall winner of the award will be selected by the competition co-chairs and the panel members. 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 at the December 2021 ICIS Conference.

Panel of judges:

SUBMIT NOMINATION