Formative Assignment
Critically Evaluating Your Research Article
You may find this the most difficult part of your work, as you may not be very familiar with your specialist
Masters subject nor have much experience at reading research articles in English. Here are some tips to
help you assess the piece of research you have chosen to focus on.
Putting your article in context.
How important is the article?
A good indication about how significant an item of research is, is to search for it in ‘Google Scholar’(if the
author(s)’ names are very unusual, you may only need to type them in, otherwise type in the full title and
authors’ surnames). You will get a result looking like this:
If there are a large number of papers that referred to you article (‘cited by’), it is a good indication it is
important; if there aren’t, don’t worry … it may be that it was published only very recently, or addresses just
a very narrow area of a subject – something you need to acknowledge when you are evaluating the paper.
How important are the authors?
It is a good idea to put each authors name in the general ‘Library Search’ on the King’s library website. It
may be that one or more of the writers is very well-known in your subject area … again this is something
you could mention in your write-up (they may be so well-known, they may have a Wikipedia page just for
them, so it’s worth searching for the name in the ordinary Google search engine).
How important is the article in the development of your subject?
If your article is about a specific idea, it may be interesting to find out when this subject first became
important in the academic literature, how long it has been of interest and whether the nature of the subject
has changed over the years. One way of investigating this is to use the ‘Advanced Search’ function on the
King’s ‘Library Search’ and specifying the date range (as shown in the diagram on the previous page –
you’ll have to vary the date range (wider or narrower) depending on the results).
This may not be straightforward but if your paper is discussing a specific concept with its own specialized
name, it could be a useful exercise. For example, for the idea of ‘positive discrimination’: in this case the
computer will show results with both ‘positive’ and ‘discrimination’ in the title … you’ll have to scan the
pages to make sure it is the correct meaning of ‘positive discrimination’.
However, such a survey can yield some interesting results. For ‘positive discrimination’, this first featured in
the 1970s and was largely concerned with positive discrimination in education, going on in the 1980s and
1990s to look at positive discrimination in the workplace and in society as a whole and almost exclusively
taking Europe and the USA as its focus. While, positive discrimination in education is still the subject of
some research articles, later work in the 2010s are largely review articles looking back on the effects … as
a subject area, it’s no longer new and original.
When you do find a journal article that interests you, look at the Library listings for the journal as a whole. It
may be that it forms part of a special edition, looking at one specific area of your subject. If you’re lucky,
there may be an editorial discussing the significance of a particular aspect of a subject, at that time. For
example, the December 2015 issue of the Journal of Banking and Finance had a special edition devoted to
global trends in banking, regulations and financial markets:
Evaluating your article content.
How wide-ranging is your article?
A useful way to think about this is to ask six questions as a way to start thinking about it (sometimes it’s
significant to look at what an article doesn’t consider). For example:
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




What: what type of paper is it, is it based on original research or is a literature review?
Who: is the research about a specific group of people (age, sex, rich, poor, European or African)?
When: why was the article written at that particular time; is it still as important now?
Where: does the research look at a particular area of the world or a particular type of place?
Why: why was the research carried out, was it to test a particular hypothesis?
How: how was the research conducted (e.g.: using a questionnaire), could other methods be used?
Going back to your results from ‘Google Scholar’ can be useful. Your paper may have been cited by other
workers who thought of aspects of the subject not considered in the research you looked at. For example:
Hong Kong?
What about
European or
other countries?
Gave the following results and more questions:
large multinationals or
smaller,
national
firms?
Is the use of HRIS different
in different sorts of settings
(e.g.: private companies vs
universities)?
Accept by who – bosses
or workers?
How have HRIS
changed in the six
years since your
original paper?
Did the original paper
consider the extent HRIS
replaced or enhanced HRM?
And remember, you can use the ‘Search’ function on a pdf, to see where in the text your original article was
cited:
How rigorous is your article?
de Vaus’s (2014) book gives a useful checklist of questions you could put to any item of research, on which
the following questions have been based:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
What type of study is it: descriptive or explanatory?
Is it intended to make a practical, theoretical or methodological advance?
Is it testing well-formulated hypotheses or simply asking a set of questions?
Has the research filled a gap in previous knowledge; does the paper explain this clearly?
How has the study added to a subject (a new theory, new approach, resolving a conflict)?
Does it replicate or challenge earlier work?
How reliable were the research methods? If a questionnaire was used, were the questions open or
closed? Did the questions bias the results?
8. What is the overall scope of the study; is it widely applicable?
9. In what time period do the results apply?
10. In what countries/areas/situations do the results apply?
11. Is the sample group sufficiently large or diverse?
12. Is the time range of the study sufficient?
13. Have the authors acknowledged and commented on the weaknesses in their work?
14. How important are the results; has it been the basis of further research?
de Vaus, D., 2014 Surveys in Social Research (6th edition). Abingdon: Routledge.