Article Review and Essay Writing

Requirements of Assignment 1
The student should select an essay topic self-interested in from the list in the syllabus.
The essay report should be eight pages in length, including a title page and references. It should be typed in 12-point font, Times New Roman, and double-spaced.
The articles review part must include citations of five peer-reviewed articles and the cited articles must be fully listed in references following the APA style.
Submission (in an MS word file) should be sent no later than the end of Module 3 (please see the specific due date in the Study Guide).
Steps to do for Assignment 1

STEP 1: Choose keywords/topics for your essay
Let’s assume your topic of Assignment 1 is “resource-based theory” in international business selected from the list in the syllabus.

STEP 2: Search and select FIVE peer-reviewed research articles from BU e-library
(Your BU log-in ID and Password is required)

Each article must meet the following three conditions:

Top-level: “peer-reviewed journals”
Resource type: “articles”
Publication date: “desirably after 2006”

STEP 3: Read and synthesize the information from the articles
Students should review the articles and synthesize the information from the articles to support his/her novel essay.

STEP 4: Proofread the manuscript and make appropriate reference
On the last page, please make sure the five articles cited in text must be listed in reference/bibliography complying with the APA style guide.

How to select a topic

The student should select an essay topic either they are interested in from the following list or they may explore/develop any topic they are interested in. Students should get approval from their facilitator if they chose a topic outside of the list:

Agency theory
Comparative advantage
Competitive strategy
National competitiveness
Dynamic capabilities
Institutional theory
Factor endowment theory
Internalization theory
Leadership theory
Monopolistic advantage theory

Organizational learning
Portfolio theory
Eclectic theory
Resource-based theory
Strategic choice theory
Systems theory
Technological innovation theory
Transaction cost theory
Upper echelon theory

You should have a topic in mind by the beginning of the second module. Think about it, check out references and available materials and then forward the topic to your facilitator by the end of the second module.

What does eight pages in length mean?
It will be an assignment of technically six (6) pages writing, with one for the title page and one for the reference.
Remember, this is a graduate course, so the main focus is on quality and research, not about hitting a page number on the mark. The page number is meant as a guideline as I expect it will take around this number to fully explore an essay.
What is the APA style guide?
American Psychological Association or APA style is widely accepted in social sciences research.
It guides citing references in the text. Throughout the body of your paper, briefly note the author and date of research that you mention.
Full information is needed to identify the correct source in the References list at the end of your paper.
For more information, consult the 6th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association.
What is a peer-reviewed article?
Peer review is a well-accepted indicator of quality scholarship. It is the process by which an author’s peers read a paper submitted for publication. Articles accepted for publication through a peer-review process implicitly meet the discipline’s expected standards of expertise.
Peer-reviewed journals can be identified by their editorial statements or instructions to authors.
For your caution, just because a journal is peer-reviewed does not guarantee that all articles in it are included in the peer-review process. Some article types, such as news items, editorials, and book reviews, may not go through the peer-review process.
For Assignment 1 reference articles, the followings are NOT acceptable:
Articles/information from the textbook, book chapters
Articles/information from the Internet, websites, Google search, etc.
Articles/information from newspapers, magazines, unpublished working papers
Please invest your time and make your effort to search peer-reviewed articles from BU e-library.
Expectations for Assignment 1
You should present five specific pieces of evidence. Such evidence should always include citations in the text of the five (5) articles, with your analysis of the articles.
Each paragraph in the text may focus on one specific article, and each evidence should be supported or opposed by other specific articles
Summarizing an article is an easy way to knock off a page, but your professor knows that it requires much more mental effort to analyze the information, to synthesize opposing viewpoints, and to evaluate an argument to frame your own argument.
Please do NOT make any recitations from the articles that you had already cited in your essay.
For further clarification of the statement: ‘Please do NOT make any recitations from the citations’
What if you want to paraphrase the following information from an article: [“When restrained to pure neoclassical reasoning, the entrepreneur is thought to maximize both utility and the value and desire to succeed. More generally, entrepreneurship is seen as innovation (Aghion & Howitt, 1998) characterized by boldness and imagination (Lumpkin & Dess, 1996), leadership (Witt, 1988) or alertness and discovery (Kirzner, 1997).”]
In fact, the above information was retrieved from the literature review section of Dorobat and Topan’s (2015) article: [Dorobat, C.E., & Topan, M-V. (2015). Entrepreneurship and Comparative Advantage. Journal of Entrepreneurship, 24(1), 1-16.] Those statements were originally written by Dorobat and Topan (2015) after reviewing the four cited articles. That is a very good example of what I meant: ‘Please do NOT make any recitations from the citations.’
The topics in the list of the syllabus are mostly theories of international business and economics and management domains. As the theories already exist for a long time (mostly published before 2002), I assume that reading those conceptual papers and theories does not contribute a lot to your knowledge of international business and management. The purpose of this assignment is NOT to know who developed/conceptualized the theory (i.e. a chronicle of developing the theory).
What I really expect from Assignment 1 (Articles review and essay writing) is to read a well-organized academic essay, which can be produced only after good reading and good research.