Masters Dissertation Example

3.2.5 Collection of survey data 
The survey was created online using the online questionnaire service provider SurveyMonkey 
(SurveyMonkey, 2007). It was piloted on 20 authors of species-based papers not included in 
the sample, and the questions were modified to resolve phrasing ambiguities and overlooked 
response options as required.

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The link to the survey was sent to each of the corresponding authors in the sample through an 
email mail-merge. The email contained a short explanation as to the purpose of the study, 
along with the title of their individual paper and their author ID number. Respondents were 
asked to give their perceptions on the issue in relation to the research incorporated into the 
specific paper identified in the email. The editors of each journal were notified about the 
study, and this was also included in the email. 
The link was sent to an initial 200 authors from a random sample of each of the five journals, 
and monitored for a week in order to gauge potential response rate and identify any problems. 
Two of the questions were modified slightly, but not in such a way so as to precluded the use 
of the data from the first respondents. When emails were returned as undeliverable, it was 
recorded on the spreadsheet and an effort was made to obtain the correct email address of the 
corresponding author of that paper. 
3.2.6 Desk based research 
A number of explanatory variables were obtained not from the questionnaire but from desk 
based research. These included the species and country of study, and dates of submission 
obtained from each individual paper. In order to assess correlation between citation rate and 
practical implementation, the number of citations as identified by Google Scholar and ISI Web 
of Knowledge
(ISI WoK) were recorded for each paper. ISI WoK is the main tool for 
academic citation analysis (Thomson Scientific, 2007) whereas Google Scholar
is increasingly 
used for citation analysis and could potentially be a better indicator of real world 
implementation as it incorporates citations from grey literature and web pages (Google 
Scholar, 2007). The most recent Impact Factor (Thomson Scientific, 2007) for each journal 
was also obtained.