What Are Some of Responsibilities of the Authors of Literature Review

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X Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Ten Elementary Rules for Writing a Literature Review

• Marco Pautasso

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• Published: July xviii, 2013
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

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Citation: Pautasso M (2013) Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review. PLoS Comput Biol nine(seven): e1003149. https://doi.org/x.1371/periodical.pcbi.1003149

Editor: Philip Eastward. Bourne, Academy of California San Diego, Usa of America

Published: July 18, 2013

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

Funding: This work was funded by the French Foundation for Research on Biodiversity (FRB) through its Centre for Synthesis and Assay of Biodiversity information (CESAB), as function of the NETSEED inquiry project. The funders had no role in the preparation of the manuscript.

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

Literature reviews are in bully demand in well-nigh scientific fields. Their need stems from the always-increasing output of scientific publications [1]. For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more than papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2]. Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3]. Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from master research, timely literature reviews tin can lead to new constructed insights and are ofttimes widely read [4]. For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional person way [5].

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

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

Rule ane: Define a Topic and Audience

How to choose which topic to review? In that location are so many issues in gimmicky scientific discipline that you could spend a lifetime of attention conferences and reading the literature but pondering what to review. On the i manus, if you take several years to choose, several other people may have had the same thought in the meantime. On the other paw, only a well-considered topic is likely to lead to a brilliant literature review [8]. The topic must at least exist:

1. interesting to y'all (ideally, y'all should take come up across 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 volition be interested in the review and there will exist enough material to write it), and
3. a well-defined upshot (otherwise you lot could potentially include thousands of publications, which would make the review unhelpful).

Ideas for potential reviews may come from papers providing lists of fundamental research questions to be answered [9], but also from serendipitous moments during desultory reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, y'all should also select a target audition. In many cases, the topic (due east.g., spider web services in computational biology) volition automatically define an audience (e.grand., computational biologists), but that same topic may too be of involvement to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule ii: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having called your topic and audience, start past checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. Five pieces of advice here:

1. keep runway of the search items yous employ (so that your search can be replicated [x]),
2. go along a list of papers whose pdfs you cannot access immediately (so as to call back them subsequently with culling strategies),
3. utilize a newspaper direction arrangement (e.1000., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
4. ascertain early in the procedure some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria tin can then exist described in the review to help define its telescopic), and
5. do not merely await for enquiry papers in the expanse you wish to review, just also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone volition already have published a literature review (Figure 1), if not exactly on the effect 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 issue, my advice is not to surrender, but to deport on with your ain literature review,

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

The bottom-right situation (many literature reviews but few research papers) is not just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the study of the impacts of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than inquiry 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 apply:

1. be thorough,
2. utilize different keywords and database sources (e.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
3. wait at who has cited past relevant papers and volume chapters.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

If y'all read the papers first, and only afterwards starting time writing the review, you will need a very good memory to call up who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each unmarried paper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights about how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This mode, by the fourth dimension you have read the literature you selected, you volition already have a rough draft of the review.

Of course, this draft will nonetheless need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [xi], merely you will accept avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank certificate. Be careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if you are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the concluding draft. Information technology is of import to be careful in noting the references already at this stage, so as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very beginning of your endeavor volition save y'all time.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you volition have a rough idea of the amount of material available for the review. This is probably a good time to decide whether to become for a mini- or a full review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the final few years, with a limit on the number of words and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review: it may well attract more than attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some bug and get out out some relevant material due to space limitations. A full review will have the advantage of more than liberty to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, merely may then exist left in the pile of the very important papers "to be read" by readers with little time to spare for major monographs.

There is probably a continuum between mini- and total reviews. The aforementioned point applies to the dichotomy of descriptive vs. integrative reviews. While descriptive reviews focus on the methodology, findings, and interpretation of each reviewed report, integrative reviews effort to detect mutual ideas and concepts from the reviewed material [12]. A similar stardom exists between narrative and systematic reviews: while narrative reviews are qualitative, systematic reviews endeavour to test a hypothesis based on the published evidence, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13], [14]. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The pick between different review types will have to exist made on a example-by-case basis, depending non just on the nature of the fabric 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].

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Brand It of Broad Interest

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a total review, it is good advice to keep it focused xvi,17. Including cloth just for the sake of it tin hands atomic number 82 to reviews that are trying to do too many things at in one case. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to bridge the gap between fields [xviii]. If you are writing a review on, for case, how epidemiological approaches are used in modelling the spread of ideas, y'all may be inclined to include material from both parent fields, epidemiology and the study of cultural diffusion. This may be necessary to some extent, just 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 important feature of a successful review, this requirement has to be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a wide audience. This square may exist circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Dominion 6: Exist Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is non stamp collecting. A proficient review does non but summarize the literature, simply discusses it critically, identifies methodological issues, and points out inquiry gaps [xix]. After having read a review of the literature, a reader should have a rough thought of:

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

It is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution tin can be to involve a prepare of complementary coauthors: some people are excellent at mapping what has been accomplished, some others are very good at identifying night clouds on the horizon, and some have instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of squad, and then you should definitely write a review of the literature! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review needs consistency, for example in the choice of passive vs. active voice and nowadays vs. by tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Similar a crisp cake, a good review has a number of telling features: information technology is worth the reader's 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. However, a full general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and have-home letters brand sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, there is a trend towards including information almost how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [20].

How tin you lot organize the menstruum of the main torso of the review then that the reader volition be drawn into and guided through information technology? Information technology is generally helpful to describe a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques. Such diagrams tin help recognize a logical way to club and link the various sections of a review [21]. This is the instance not just at the writing phase, just also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A conscientious selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22].

Rule 8: Make Utilise of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are ordinarily peer-reviewed in the same way equally research papers, and rightly so [23]. As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers profoundly helps improve a review draft. Having read the review with a fresh mind, reviewers may spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that had not been noticed by the writers due to rereading the typescript too many times. It is however advisable to reread the draft 1 more time before submission, as a last-infinitesimal correction of typos, leaps, and muddled sentences may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content rather than the form.

Feedback is vital to writing a good review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so as to obtain a diversity of views on the draft. This may atomic number 82 in some cases to conflicting views on the merits of the paper, and on how to improve it, but such a situation is better than the absenteeism of feedback. A multifariousness of feedback perspectives on a literature review tin help identify where the consensus view stands in the landscape of the current scientific understanding of an issue [24].

Dominion 9: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but Exist Objective

In many cases, reviewers of the literature will accept published studies relevant to the review they are writing. This could create a disharmonize of interest: how can reviewers written report objectively on their ain work [25]? Some scientists may be overly enthusiastic most what they accept published, and thus run a risk giving as well much importance to their own findings in the review. Even so, bias could also occur in the other direction: some scientists may be unduly dismissive of their own achievements, then that they will tend to downplay their contribution (if whatsoever) to a field when reviewing it.

In full general, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations brochure nor an exercise in competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is upward to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then it should be possible to exist objective in reviewing one's ain relevant findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this may exist achieved past assigning the review of the results of a coauthor to dissimilar coauthors.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Practice Not Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature need awareness non merely of the overall direction and achievements of a field of research, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-date before they accept been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify equally a major research gap an issue that has but been addressed in a serial of papers in press (the same applies, of form, to older, overlooked studies ("sleeping beauties" [26])). This implies that literature reviewers would practise well to keep an center on electronic lists of papers in press, given that it tin can have months before these announced in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they accept scanned the literature up to a certain point in fourth dimension, but given that peer review can be a rather lengthy procedure, a total search for newly appeared literature at the revision phase may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that take just appeared is particularly challenging, because there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and touch on on further research and guild.

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

Acknowledgments

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

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