I finished my master thesis for the Public Administration program at Leiden University in 2012. My thesis was graded with a nine and my thesis supervisor, dr. Dimiter Toshkov, considered it suitable for publication in a scientific peer-reviewed journal. We transformed it to an article and submitted it for review at two journals, first the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory and later Government Information Quarterly. After a lengthy period of waiting for the peer reviewers to respond and making some modifications, the article was published by the latter journal in 2015.
The article can be found here at the journal’s website. Unfortunately it is not an Open Access article, but you can download a pre-print from my website: Van Loon and Toshkov (2015)
The adoption of open source software (OSS) by Dutch municipalities was the subject of our research. The Dutch national government’s stimulus policy allowed governmental organizations to implement OSS at their own discretion. As a consequence, some municipalities use OSS a lot, but the majority lags behind. We sought to identify which factors could explain the variability in the adoption of this innovation. We found that boundary spanning and the influence of local politics were statistically significant factors. Other factors, like municipality size, the complexity of the municipality’s hierarchy and the financial situation, had no effect.
Statistical analysis for the research was performed with R. The document was created with LaTeX and the graphs were made with a combination of R and PGF/TikZ. All the necessary LaTeX source files and R scripts are attached to the PDF document so that anyone can verify and reproduce our research.
Pingback: Thesis finally published in a scientific peer-reviewed journal – Information Overload