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At SIGITE 2006 we reported on a preliminary analysis of of Masters Theses produced in IT programs. We believed that they could serve as a window into current IT research 1. It has already been over two years, but at last we are moving forward on the gathering of information and the first steps associated with creating a repository of IT Research. In this project we are attempting do a more complete analysis of existing Theses and Dissertations. Please help us by providing information about these documents of which you may be aware. We would especially like URLs that give access to the complete theses and also papers that may have resulted from or strongly influenced the research. Thesis Data Entry is the form.
The 2006 analysis showed that there is some consistency in the topics pursued by master’s students under the direction of IT faculty. There also appear to be certain patterns that the theses follow, for example several have the form: Evaluation of <technology> for <purpose>, or something very similar. These theses specifically address the application of a particular technology in a context. They are each specific instances of research into the more general question proposed by Reichgelt “What is the value of an IT application, and how do you measure it?”2. There are also theses that address return on investment for particular technologies. These are instances of research into Reichgelt’s second question “What is the cost of an IT application and how do you measure it?” However, such theses might extend beyond demonstrating the value of IT to also include the effects of IT, where effect is sometimes positive and sometimes negative. We think this aligns with the intent of Reighgelt’s first two questions, but would suggest a broader scope, such as “What are the costs and effects of IT applications and do you measure them?”
There are also many development theses, which have the form: Implementing <service> for <context>. These instances may not match a research question, but rather directly match the definition of IT. It is interesting that there are theses from each school that implement web-based tools for the management of student work in an educational setting. This is not surprising given that IT departments are in the business of evaluating and managing student work.
Summary of Earlier Results
The following was excerpted from ref 1.
The theses titles were gathered from school records from 2005 with some instances from early 2006. They were selected based upon their IT orientation. The theses were then classified based upon a concept analysis of the topics represented by the titles and guided by the definition of IT and its enumeration in the body of knowledge. The documents were clustered based upon subject from the title and abstract and then the groupings were refined until there were five clusters. There were clear clusters surrounding the following classifications:
DEV: Development, building, implementation, integration and other such terms that indicate delivery of a system into a context.
ED: These theses came in two flavors, those that were focused on concept learning and those that were actually the application of IT to an educational setting. The second class could have been considered development, however, we classified them with the ED group because the primary application domain was education.
IAS: Information Assurance, Security, and Forensics
PROJ: Project management and applications of IT to Project Management. Similar to the ED grouping, we classified development projects focused on the delivery of Project management infrastructure in the PROJ group.
TECH: This class includes technology evaluation and testing. “Comparison” and “evaluation” seem to be the most common indicator terms.
This classification scheme is loose; by that we mean that there were no rules for clearly differentiating one category from another. The goal was to create a list of no more than 5 major categories to make it relatively simple to do the classification. Even with this very simple scheme, several of the theses could be placed in more than one category. For example one thesis describes the implementation of the UI for ordered sorting of table columns and reports on human factors research into its effectiveness. Is that DEV or TECH? Another is the development of an enterprise portal for higher education. This was classified ED even though it could be easily classified as DEV. However, each of the categories and each of the theses are clearly under the umbrella of “the study of methodologies, tools and techniques for meeting the needs of users in an organization and societal context through the selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing technologies.” 2Those familiar with the programs (i.e., Brigham Young University and Purdue University) used for this analysis can see the influence of particular professors on the research of the students. The “project management”, “forensics” and “context aware computing” theses are related to research interests of particular professors at the institutions involved. However, the fact that there are no inherent characteristics that indicate the school of origin is evidence that there is an implicit research agenda evolving at least in these two schools. To bring the point home, the school of origin has been omitted from the table in Appendix A. It is important to note that this evolution has occurred without explicit action on the part of the two schools. There is a high probability that other schools have been evolving in similar ways.
1Ekstrom, J. J., Dark, M. J., Lunt, B. M., and Reichgelt, H. 2006.
A research agenda for information technology: does research
literature already exist?. In Proceedings of the 7th Conference
on information Technology Education (Minneapolis, Minnesota,
USA, October 19 - 21, 2006). SIGITE '06. ACM, New York, NY, 19-24.
DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1168812.1168820
2 Reichgelt, H. 2004. Towards a research agenda
for information technology. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference
on information Technology Education (Salt Lake City, UT, USA,
October 28 - 30, 2004). CITC5 '04. ACM, New York, NY, 248-254. DOI=
http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1029533.1029596
