Question:

You are required to read four journal articles and develop your own abstract for each article. All the articles will most likely already have an abstract developed by the original authors, however the abstract you will develop will have a specific format and content described below.

The four articles to read and write abstracts for are:

Cao, J, Basoglu, KA, Sheng, H & Lowry, PB 2015, 'A systematic review of social networks research in information systems: building a foundation for exciting future research', Communications of the Association for Information Systems, vol. 36, no. 1, art. 37, pp. 727-758.

Boote, DN & Beile, P 2005, 'Scholars before researchers: on the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research preparation', Educational researcher, vol. 34, no. 6, pp. 3-15.

Gioia, DA & Pitre, E 1990, 'Multiparadigm perspectives on theory building', Academy of Management Review, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 584-602.

Gregor, S 2006, 'The nature of theory in information systems', MIS Quarterly, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 611-642.

Each abstract should have the following format, the details of which are adapted from the recommendation of the Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA):

An abstract should be clearly written and succinct. Its contents should enable an electronic search to find the article (without the need for the whole article to be searched). The abstract should also inform the reader of the article's expected contents.

Your abstract should have the following format. The first sentence should completely summarise the article. There should then be individual sentences to describe each of the article's objective, data, method, analysis, results, conclusions, and targeted audience. If there are limitations these should also be included.

The abstract should not repeat whole sentences, or significant parts of sentences, from any part of the article. It should not contain citations and its tone should be neutral, that is not bragging.