How to Write a Review Paper That Contains Your Own Data

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10 Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Ten Elementary Rules for Writing a Literature Review

• Marco Pautasso

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• Published: July 18, 2013
• https://doi.org/x.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

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Citation: Pautasso M (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review. PLoS Comput Biol nine(7): e1003149. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

Editor: Philip Due east. Bourne, Academy of California San Diego, United States of America

Published: July 18, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Marco Pautasso. This is an open-access article distributed nether the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: This work was funded by the French Foundation for Inquiry on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Center for Synthesis and Analysis of Biodiversity data (CESAB), as part of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no role in the training of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The writer has declared that no competing interests exist.

Literature reviews are in great need in nearly scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [1]. For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and xl times more papers were indexed in Spider web of Scientific discipline on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [two]. Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3]. Thus, information technology is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews tin can pb to new constructed insights and are oftentimes widely read [4]. For such summaries to be useful, notwithstanding, they need to exist compiled in a professional style [v].

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature tin require a titanic corporeality of work. That is why researchers who accept spent their career working on a sure research effect are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are at present offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their projection past producing an overview of what has already been washed on their enquiry event [6]. However, it is likely that most scientists take not thought in detail nearly how to approach and carry out a literature review.

Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant textile to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills [7]. In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews equally a PhD and postdoctoral student. Ideas and insights likewise come up from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, equally well as feedback from reviewers and editors.

Dominion 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? There are then many issues in gimmicky scientific discipline that you could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature only pondering what to review. On the one hand, if you accept several years to choose, several other people may have had the same idea in the meantime. On the other hand, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a bright literature review [8]. The topic must at to the lowest degree exist:

1. interesting to you (ideally, you should accept come beyond a series of recent papers related to your line of work that call for a critical summary),
2. an important aspect of the field (so that many readers will be interested in the review and there volition exist enough material to write information technology), and
3. a well-defined issue (otherwise you could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of key research questions to be answered [9], but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In add-on to choosing your topic, you should also select a target audition. In many cases, the topic (e.yard., web services in computational biology) will automatically define an audience (due east.g., computational biologists), simply that same topic may as well exist of involvement to neighbouring fields (e.k., informatics, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having chosen your topic and audition, first by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

1. keep track of the search items you use (so that your search can exist replicated [10]),
2. keep a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot admission immediately (then equally to retrieve them after with alternative strategies),
3. apply a paper management system (e.m., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
4. ascertain early in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria can then exist described in the review to help define its scope), and
5. practise not just look for research papers in the surface area you wish to review, but likewise seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone will already take published a literature review (Figure i), if not exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If there are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your event, my communication is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

Effigy 1. A conceptual diagram of the demand for dissimilar types of literature reviews depending on the amount of published enquiry papers and literature reviews.

The bottom-correct situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the report of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there announced to be more literature reviews than research studies [33].

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149.g001

1. discussing in your review the approaches, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,
2. trying to find a new angle that has not been covered adequately in the previous reviews, and
3. incorporating new material that has inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent papers and reviews, the usual rules utilize:

1. be thorough,
2. use dissimilar keywords and database sources (e.one thousand., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
3. look at who has cited past relevant papers and book chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers start, and only afterwards start writing the review, you will need a very proficient memory to retrieve who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single newspaper. My communication is, while reading, to commencement writing downward interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the fourth dimension yous have read the literature you selected, y'all volition already have a crude draft of the review.

Of form, this draft will yet need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11], but you volition have avoided the danger posed past staring at a blank document. Exist careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. Information technology is appropriate then to reformulate such quotes with your ain words in the final draft. It is important to be careful in noting the references already at this phase, then as to avert misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your try will salve you time.

Dominion 4: Choose the Blazon of Review You Wish to Write

Subsequently having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material bachelor for the review. This is probably a good fourth dimension to decide whether to go for a mini- or a total review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather curt reviews focusing on the terminal few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is non necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more than attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and leave out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the reward of more than freedom to comprehend in particular the complexities of a item scientific development, but may then be left in the pile of the very important papers "to exist read" by readers with little fourth dimension to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and full reviews. The aforementioned betoken applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and estimation of each reviewed study, integrative reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12]. A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on the published testify, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13], [14]. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative style, they become meta-analyses. The choice betwixt different review types volition have to be made on a case-by-case basis, depending non only on the nature of the material constitute and the preferences of the target journal(s), but also on the fourth dimension available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15].

Dominion 5: Keep the Review Focused, simply Make It of Broad Involvement

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a total review, it is good advice to continue it focused xvi,17. Including material just for the sake of it can easily lead to reviews that are trying to do too many things at once. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap betwixt fields [18]. If y'all are writing a review on, for example, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, you may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, simply in this case a focused review would only deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an of import characteristic of a successful review, this requirement has to be counterbalanced with the need to make the review relevant to a wide audience. This square may be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not postage collecting. A good review does not just summarize the literature, just discusses it critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [xix]. After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough idea of:

1. the major achievements in the reviewed field,
2. the principal areas of debate, and
3. the outstanding inquiry questions.

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution can be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are first-class at mapping what has been accomplished, some others are very good at identifying dark clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal society has exactly this sort of team, then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to disquisitional thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active vocalisation and present vs. past tense.

Rule seven: Find a Logical Structure

Like a crisp cake, a skillful review has a number of telling features: information technology is worth the reader'south time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. It also needs a adept structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. Nonetheless, a full general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-domicile letters make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, at that place is a trend towards including information about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20].

How tin can you organize the flow of the chief torso of the review so that the reader will exist drawn into and guided through information technology? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, eastward.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can aid recognize a logical way to guild and link the various sections of a review [21]. This is the case non just at the writing stage, simply also for readers if the diagram is included in the review every bit a figure. A conscientious selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can exist very helpful to construction the text too [22].

Dominion 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way equally enquiry papers, and rightly so [23]. As a dominion, incorporating feedback from reviewers greatly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh listen, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had non been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft i more fourth dimension before submission, as a last-minute correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the course.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, and then as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may lead in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to meliorate it, merely such a state of affairs is improve than the absenteeism of feedback. A diversity of feedback perspectives on a literature review tin can help identify where the consensus view stands in the mural of the electric current scientific understanding of an issue [24].

Rule 9: Include Your Ain Relevant Research, just Be Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will have published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a conflict of involvement: how tin reviewers written report objectively on their own work [25]? Some scientists may exist overly enthusiastic virtually what they have published, and thus take a chance giving also much importance to their ain findings in the review. However, bias could too occur in the other management: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, so that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

In general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an do in competitive self-deprival. If a reviewer is upwardly to the task of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, so it should exist possible to be objective in reviewing one's own relevant findings. In reviews written past multiple authors, this may be accomplished by assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to different coauthors.

Rule ten: Be Upward-to-Engagement, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness not just of the overall direction and achievements of a field of inquiry, simply besides of the latest studies, then as not to get out-of-appointment before they take been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify equally a major enquiry gap an issue that has just been addressed in a serial of papers in press (the same applies, of course, to older, overlooked studies ("sleeping beauties" [26])). This implies that literature reviewers would practise well to go on an eye on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it can take months before these announced in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a sure point in time, only given that peer review can be a rather lengthy process, a full search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may exist worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have just appeared is especially challenging, because there is petty perspective with which to guess their significance and bear upon on further research and society.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters subsequently the review has been published, and so that there may soon be the demand for an updated review. But this is the nature of science [27]–[32]. I wish everybody good luck with writing a review of the literature.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Yard. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, Grand. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, M. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, Yard. Stancanelli, P. Weisberg, and X. Xu for insights and discussions, and to P. Bourne, T. Matoni, and D. Smith for helpful comments on a previous draft.

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Source: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

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