STEP FOUR

Read these 4-5 journal articles, and either (a) select your article or
(b) go back to one of the previous steps

Reading the titles and abstracts of journal articles, as well as skimming through those sections that explain how the research was conducted, should help to create a shortlist of potential journal articles. However, we would now suggest reading through each of these 4-5 journal articles in their entirety. You shouldn't expect to understand everything that you read. In fact, there may be large sections that you struggle with at this time, especially the Results sections of such journal articles, unless you are already familiar with interpreting statistical results. Therefore, focus on the introductions within these journal articles, the hypotheses that were set, the research strategy used, and the discussion of the results rather than the results themselves (i.e., this discussion will tell you what the results were without you having to understand all the statistical output at this time). This will give you a lot of the information you need to know in order to justify taking on a replication-based dissertation. It will also give you a much better sense of which of the journal articles you are seriously considering duplicating, making generalisations from, or extending in some way.

As a general point, your university may have paid to get access to many of these journal articles, but if not, paying for an individual article may be worth it. If you need to rely on your university access, but have too few journal article on the shortlist after checking to see if the shortlisted articles are available, consider widening your search criteria in Google Scholar (e.g., extend the publication date from 2012 to 2011).

You should now be ready to select your main journal article from the list. However, if you are still weighing up 2-3 journal articles, it is not a bad idea to keep all of these in mind, and simply move onto STAGE TWO: Choosing your route. This will give you a chance to think a little more about how the particular route that you could follow (i.e., Route A: Duplication, Route B: Generalisation or Route C: Extension) will impact on your choice of journal article.

References

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