Doctoral Paper

The Enterprise Engineering Network (EEN) Doctoral Consortium is a workshop for doctoral students whose research is related to the Enterprise Engineering research topics at any stage in their thesis. The goal of the Doctoral Consortium is to help the doctoral students with their thesis by giving feedback on their own research work as well as to give some general advice on making the most of their research environment.

The first objective of the EEN Doctoral Consortium is to encourage doctoral students to write, submit and present papers and to help them to improve the quality of the papers. The second objective is to be a platform for meeting each other as well as for meeting the members of the EE.

Members of the EEN Doctoral Consortium Referee Board will accompany the workshop. They will study all the papers and comment on the content of the thesis as well as on the presentations. The doctoral students will have between half to one hour time for their presentations, focusing on what the main theme of the thesis is, what has been achieved and how the work should continue. Another half to one hour is reserved for discussion and feedback from both the members of the referee board and the other doctoral students.

Why write a doctoral paper?

When was the last time you were thinking about the state of your doctoral thesis? Have you ever written a paper about your doctoral thesis for convincing people that what you are doing makes sense and that it is different from or better than existing solutions? Have you ever explained to someone exactly why you propose your solution?

In writing a paper for the EEN Doctoral Consortium, you have to think, write and convince people about all these points. In return, you will receive feedback, guidance and support.

Not only will you learn from the discussions about your own work, but also from other doctoral students in action! The best way to learn how to present your work may be from seeing both good and bad examples. Having said that, the EE Doctoral Consortium provides a friendly and supportive forum for such experiences.

What should be the content of such a paper? Different from other papers, this paper addresses specifically your thesis, that is the thesis, the whole thesis and nothing but the thesis. You should answer questions like:

  • What is the problem being addressed in your thesis?
  • What is the solution you are proposing?
  • How does it relate to existing work?
  • What is the state of your thesis?
  • What have you done so far?
  • What are your future plans?

The EEN Doctoral Consortium will be rounded off by a discussion of general questions related to your research. They include, but are not limited to, the following aspects:

  • Problem formulation
  • Analysis and evaluation of the state of the doctoral thesis
  • Research methodology
    • Underlying principles of the approach,
    • Utility of the approach
    • Validation of the results
  • Critical evaluation of one’s own work
    • Identification of the target audience and beneficiaries of a thesis
    • Validation techniques (such as prototyping, field experiment, or argumentation)
  • Definition of the innovative contribution of a thesis to the existing state of the art.

Requirements

Papers must conform to Springer’s LNBIP format and should not exceed 15 pages, including all text, figures, references and appendices. Information about the Springer LNBIP format can be found at Springer LNBIP Web page. In the author section of the paper, the first name and affiliation should be of the student. The supervisor(s) names and affiliations should follow with the respective role (e.g., main supervisor, or co-supervisor) between brackets after the name. In the submission only the student should be specified as author.

Your submitted paper should

  •  clearly formulate the research question,
  •  identify the significant problems in the field of research,
  •  outline the current knowledge of the problem domain, as well as the state of existing solutions,
  • present clearly any preliminary ideas, the proposed approach and the results achieved so far,
  • sketch the research methodology that is or will be applied,
  • point out the contributions of the applicant to the problem solution, and
  • state in what aspects the suggested solution is different, new or better as compared to existing approaches to the problem.

Papers will be judged on originality, significance, correctness, and clarity.

Paper type
max pages initial version
max pages final version
doctoral paper
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