It is important to recognise several significant limitations of the approach adopted.
Firstly, the papers published within Construction Management and Economics may
not be reflective of the entire construction management research community. A search
of papers published in other journals may have revealed that they attract papers from
a different constituency of the research community which adopt different research
methods. Secondly, this study represents an analysis of only those papers published
and not submitted to the Journal. As such, the analysis may be more representative
of the biases of referees rather than being necessarily representative of the
methods actually adopted by construction management researchers. A third limitation
concerns the nature of the methodological description contained within the papers
themselves. This is highly variable and renders any such analysis somewhat tenuous. In
addition, it is possible within some of the projects that other methods were employed
which have not been unambiguously stated within the papers. These aspects may
not have been published or may have been published elsewhere for legitimate
reasons (such as word restrictions placed on articles within the Journal). A fourth issue
concerns the reliability of drawing general conclusions based on a single year’s worth
of papers. It is possible that papers published in this year were anomalous to the
general trends in the kind of papers published within the Journal. A final issue is that
not all of the papers published within the Journal can be described as ‘social research’.
For example, some papers dealt with aspects of construction law or finance, which
have only loose connections to social phenomena, for which the utilisation of qualitative
methods would have been inappropriate