Masters Dissertation Example

3.2.2 Journal selection 
Five major international conservation journals; Animal Conservation (AC), Biodiversity & 
Conservation (BD), Biological Conservation (BC), Conservation Biology (CB), and Oryx (O) 
were selected for analysis. Each of the selected journals has a different focus and editorial 
policy, reflecting a range of research focuses (Fazey et al, 2005). CB, the ‘most influential and 
frequently cited journal in its field’ (Conservation Biology, 2007) has a wide research scope, 
AC (Animal Conservation, 2007) publishes papers with ‘general implications for the scientific 
basis of conservation’, and BD is multidisciplinary, encouraging contributions from 
developing countries (Biodiversity & Conservation, 2007). Only BC and O place an emphasis 
on ‘the practical applications of conservation research’ (Biological Conservation, 2007), and 
‘material that has the potential to improve conservation management’ (Oryx, 2007) 

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Targeting specific journals will obviously influence results but it was necessary to only 
incorporate research aimed specifically at conservation, and such purposive sampling (Milner-
Gulland & Rowcliffe, in press) is justified, as these journals provide a sample representative of 
the most widely read publications in the field of conservation (Fazey et al, 2005).
The six year period 2000-2005 was selected on the basis that previous surveys (Ormerod et al, 
2002; Flashpohler et al, 2000) indicate that there is at least a time lag of at least one year 
before implementation, whereas levels of implementation are likely to decline as the time 
since publication increases due to decreasing relevance of the study to current conditions 
(Flashpohler et al, 2000). 
3.2.3 Sample selection and collation 
Only species-based primary research papers were selected for inclusion in the sample. This 
was due to the fact that the conservation literature is extremely wide ranging in scope, and the 
implementation of research focusing on more general issues such as species richness, 
biodiversity patterns, and habitat fragmentation, whilst of importance, is likely to be more 
difficult to assess. A species-based approach is justified as it is widely recognised as an 
important conservation unit (Wilson, 2000) 
However, due to the need for a large sample size to dampen biases integral to the survey 
method (section 3.2.1), ‘species-based’ was taken to incorporate papers with a focus on a 
group of species as long as the research was based in a defined geographical area. With 
previous response rates at 47% for a similar editorial survey (Ormerod et al, 2002), and 30% 
for authors of Conservation Biology (Flashpohler et al, 2000), restricting the survey to single 
species papers could have been limiting; particularly for journals with a wider focus such as 
CB and BC. Incorporated into the design of the survey was the option to differentiate between 
single species papers and others (section 3.2.4.1).
Each journal was searched by hand for papers meeting the criteria above, the citations for 
which were subsequently downloaded into Refworks (Refworks, 2007) and a field created in 
which the email and name of the corresponding author was entered. Corresponding authors 
were selected as respondents as their contact details were accessible, and it was thought that 

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they would be most likely to have been the driver of research. When the sample was complete, 
it was downloaded into an excel spreadsheet and sorted according to journal and year. Each 
individual paper was given an ID number. The database was then checked for duplicate 
authors (those with more than one paper), and these were removed and stored in a separate 
file. Only one paper from each of these authors was chosen at random for incorporation into 
the sample, in order to avoid potential pseudo-replication.