Critical Analysis of a Research Article

An example of how to do a critical analysis of a research paperThis essay offers shows how to critically analyse a research paper. Critical analysis here means an evaluation of the article’s content through justified criticism that brings out the positives and negatives with the aim of finding ways to improve it. The article chosen for the analysis was written by Stan Davis & Tom Albright about the implementation of the balanced scorecard in banks. The article was published in 2004 in the academic journal Management Accounting Research.Article Title“An Investigation of the effect of Balanced Scorecard implementation on Financial Performance.”The title is a little misleading as it seems to imply that the article will guide you through the implementation of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). This is not the case as, once you read on, you will discover that the article merely describes the effects of implementing the BSC and does not actually analyse the implementation of the BSC. Given the nature of the study, a more appropriate title could read like this: “A Quasi- Experimental study of the effect of balanced scorecard implementation on financial performance.”Abstract and Introduction.The article’s abstract is sufficient in the information it provides because it identifies all the essential issues involved in the article. On the other hand, although the introduction is informative, it should have shed some light on traditional control and performance measurement to inform the reader at this stage so that they can later compare with the BSC.The statement that “A primary tenet of the BSC is that success must be achieved on key non- financial measures (NFM’s) prior to realising success on key financial measures” can potentially confuse the reader because the authors were eventually not able to “obtain the detailed data for any of the NFM’s”.
The Balanced Scorecard experiment
In the literature review the authors stated that in…