FORMAT, CONTENT AND ORGANIZATION

The review should be a maximum of ten (10) A4 pages, typed using the Seminar Paper Review Form and should generally have the following format and organization and cover the following points. Be flexible in your approach. The questions are prompts to let you know what to look for. Please DO NOT answer just YES or NO.

1. Summary

Prepare a concise summary of the paper (no more than one page) that will tell someone who has not read the paper what it is about. Specifically, what was the research question/s? 

Why was the question/s important? What method of data collection and analysis was used? What were the results?

2. Introduction and Motivation

What motivation did the author(s) give for the research? The motivation is the reason or justification for expending the time, effort and money in conducting the research.

How did the authors demonstrate why the research is important, and to whom it isimportant?

Did they convince you of the importance of the study? Why or why not?

3. Literature Review and Theory Development (sometimes this is combined with 4below)

How did the author/s demonstrate their scholarly ability to identify and outline relevant existing knowledge?

How did the author/s identify the gap in the existing literature which they reviewed?

How did the author/s locate their study in the relevant literature?2

4. Theory development and hypotheses formulation (if applicable - not all papers willdevelop hypotheses)

What were the independent and dependent variables examined in the research? How the author(s) motivate or justify the choice of variables adequately?

Were there other important variables that were not included in the research that should have been?

How were the variables related in the hypotheses or model(s)?

How d i d the hypotheses or model(s) follow logically from the theory provided (and/or the literature reviewed)?

5. Method

What was the research method? (The applicability of the following questions depends on the research method used)

Was this the most appropriate method to collect data to test the hypotheses and/or address the research question? Why or why not?

What are the strengths and weaknesses of the method in terms of testing the hypotheses and/or addressing the research question?

How were the variables measured or operationalized? (It is possible that this question is not applicable to the paper under review)

Discuss how the measures are valid (measuring the concept they purported to measure) and reliable (measuring consistently across time and samples)?

Identify any threats to internal validity (the extent to which one can believe the results of the study). Were there any omitted variables potentially correlated with both the independent and dependent variables that could serve as rival hypotheses or confounds to the results? How significant were the threats to internal validity?

Identify any threats to external validity (the extent to which one can generalize the results beyond the sample). How significant were the threats to external validity?

6. Results

Did the author(s) explain their results satisfactorily? (This requires more than a yes/no answer)

In particular, where results were inconsistent with hypotheses, did the author(s) seek toprovide possible explanations? Were these explanations plausible?

OR

How were these results consistent or inconsistent with the literature and the explanatoryframework developed by the authors framework suggested by the authors?

7. Discussion and conclusions

What conclusions did the author(s) draw from the study? How did they relate them to the original research problem?

Did the author(s) discuss the limitations of their research? Were there other limitations that should have been discussed or acknowledged?

Did the author(s) discuss the implications of their findings for practice (economic and/or social decision-making) and/or theory (the advancement of knowledge in the area of the research)?

Were there any other implications the author(s) should have stated?

Discuss how the author(s) identified areas for future research arising from their study.

8. References

If you have referred to other papers or materials in your review, provide full bibliographical details in a list of references.