A starting point for PhD students considering how to embark on action research and/or design science research

(Disclaimer: This annotated reading list is my view, what I tell PhD students in my course, it's fitting to the PhD students that I meet all over Scandinavia, in particular those doing an industrial PhD - it's not a canonical list. )

1st Reading:

• McKay & Marshall 2001: is a classic as it explain so well the dual purposes of doing problem-solving and research simultaneously. [PDF]
• Iversen et al. 2004: is on the list because it explains in a central figure what the specific action research activities are - not as a general method to follow, but how it was adapted to the specifics; and then it also shows by example how one can report from action research cycles. [PDF]
• Davison et al. 2004: that's the canonical version of action research, the agreed and generic version of action research that most researchers refer to for authority. [PDF]
• Lindgren et al. 2004: that's a very fine argument based on two action research cycles and the results are about an information systems (actually two and in more than one version perhaps more precisely there are prototypes) and it's particularly interesting because it's about the designed system and not as many action research papers about a problem-solving process. This is also interesting because the paper has later been rehashed into an explanation of action design research (Sein et al. 2011) - same results though, but their late explanation of the research process is different.
• Sein et al. 2011: is the first explanation of action design research and interesting because it seeks to link action research and design science research
• Davison et al. 2012: emphasises the role of theory in action research - while that is also covered in many other papers on action research this paper connects directly to the canonical action research (Davison et al. 2004) - but theory is also dealt with in (McKay & Marshall 2001; Iversen et al. 2004; Lindgren et al. 2004) and it's also covered in by the various styles of reporting action research (Mathiassen et al. 2012).
• Mathiassen et al. 2012: analyses several action research paper to elicit the structure, style, and argumentation (the genre if you will) of these papers and they sum up what to look for when presenting action research.
• Peffers et al. 2007: describe a process through which one can do design science research - I could also have referred to
• Hevner et al. 2004: is a classic as it bring much of the commonality of previous design science research to the forefront and explains the research process
• Markus et al. 2002: is a brilliant example of a paper reporting on an IT artefact that is generalised to a degree and hence is demonstrably applicable in more than one environment. The paper is based on action research, but it's also a paper that is exemplary of design research and is taken to be design science research in (Hevner et al. 2004).

2nd Reading: