About

If you are visiting this webpage, you are likely a BSc, MSc, MBA, or MRes student at the University of Glasgow's Adam Smith Business School undertaking a dissertation project under my supervision. This page provides general guidance and information to help you plan, manage, and successfully complete your dissertation.

Dissertation Structure

There are some conventions that guide the structuring of dissertations in different subjects. The following is the commonly used structure:

  • Title Page
  • Abstract
  • Acknowledgements (optional)
  • Contents Pages (including Table of Contents, List of Figures, List of Tables, List of Notations)
  • Introduction
  • Literature Review
  • Methodology
  • Results or Discussion or Findings
  • Conclusion
  • References
  • Appendices (optional)


You should also check the requirements of dissertation projects for your study programme, including submission format like page size, page margin, font type, font size, font alignment, line spacing, and when and how to submit. Please contact your programme administrative officer or your course coordinator if anything is not clear.

Literature Review

Business Journals

Please find below three widely used lists of business journals (some top journals appear in all three lists).

The following are my highly recommended journals which might be useful for your dissertation projects. You could of course search and read articles from other journals.

Marketing

  • Journal of Consumer Psychology
  • Journal of Consumer Research
  • Journal of Marketing
  • Journal of Marketing Research
  • Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
  • Marketing Science
  • International Journal of Research in Marketing
  • Journal of Retailing
  • European Journal of Marketing
  • Industrial Marketing Management
  • International Marketing Review
  • Journal of Advertising
  • Journal of Advertising Research
  • Journal of Interactive Marketing (formerly JDM)
  • Journal of International Marketing
  • Journal of Public Policy and Marketing
  • Marketing Letters
  • Marketing Theory
  • Psychology and Marketing
  • Quantitative Marketing and Economics

Management

  • Management Science
  • Operations Research
  • European Journal of Operational Research
  • Mathematical Programming
  • ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation
  • Annals of Operations Research
  • Computational Optimization and Applications
  • Computers and Operations Research
  • Decision Sciences
  • INFORMS Journal on Computing
  • Mathematics of Operations Research

Information Systems & Operations Research

  • Information Systems Research
  • MIS Quarterly
  • Journal of Management Information Systems
  • Journal of the Association of Information Systems
  • Computers in Human Behavior
  • Decision Support Systems
  • European Journal of Information Systems
  • Expert Systems with Applications
  • Information and Management

Finance

  • Journal of Finance
  • Journal of Financial Economics
  • Review of Financial Studies
  • Journal of Corporate Finance
  • Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis
  • Journal of Money, Credit and Banking
  • Review of Finance
  • Annual Review of Financial Economics
  • European Journal of Finance

Data Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence Conferences and Journals

If you would like to investigate a dissertation topic using data science, machine learning or AI, the following computer science or engineering journals and conferences are highly recommended. In many subjects, journals have higher standards than conferences but computer science is an exception. In other words, computer science conference proceedings are the equivalent of journal publications in other fields mainly because they play a key role in the dissemination of the latest research results and have high standards, high quality, and great impact.

  • IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
  • IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
  • ACM Transactions on Information Systems
  • Journal of Machine Learning Research
  • IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation
  • Evolutionary Computation
  • IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics
  • IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
  • Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
  • ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (SIGKDD)
  • ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys)
    • International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM)
  • ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM)
  • IEEE International Conference on Data Mining (ICDM)
  • ACM International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR)
  • AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
  • International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI)

If you would like to further study data science and machine learning in your project, and would like to ask my advice for directed studies, my DSML Reading Lists can be useful.

Data

Ethics Application

If you plan to conduct any research involving human subjects, materials or data not in the public domain, you should apply for ethical approval. Please do check the UofG Ethics Guidance in regarding the ethics application process for undergraduate and postgraduate taught students or contact your programme administrative officer if you have anything not clear.

Publicly Available Data

The following data sources might be useful. If you find some publicly available datasets that can be used for dissertation projects, any of your suggestions or contributions are welcome. Please let me know and I will add them here.

Crowdsourcing Platforms/General Datasets

Other Datasets

Supervision Meeting Form

After each supervision meeting, please complete the ASBS Supervisor Meeting Form in the online system. If you have any administrative questions, please contact your programme administration team or Programme Director.

© Bowei Chen 2026