Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their demand stems from growing science**[1]. For example, in 2008 there was a three-fold, eight-fold, and 40-fold increase in malaria, obesity, and biodiversity on Web of Science compared to 1991 [2]. Given so many **, scientists cannot be expected to examine each new ** article in detail that is relevant to their interests [3]. Therefore, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of recent literature. Although recognition of scientists comes primarily from original research, timely literature reviews can lead to new comprehensive insights and are often widely read [4]. However, in order for such a summary to be useful, it needs to be compiled in a professional way [5]. Reviewing the literature from scratch can be a lot of work. This is why researchers who are working on a certain research question are best qualified to review the literature. Some graduate schools now offer literature review courses, as most graduate students start their projects with an overview of their research topic [6]. However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to conduct a literature review. Reviewing literature requires the ability to multitask, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesizing a variety of information, and from critical thinking to interpretation, evaluation, and citation skills [7]. In this post, 10 simple rules are shared,:This is what I learned from 25 literature reviews when I was a PhD and postdoc. These ideas and insights also come from discussions with authors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors. How do I choose a topic to review? There are so many problems in contemporary science that you could spend a lifetime attending conferences and reading literature, just thinking about what to review. On the one hand, if you spend a few years choosing, several other people may have had the same idea during that time. On the other hand, it is only possible to write a good literature review with only a well-thought-out topic [8]. The topic must be at least:
i) you are interested in (ideally, you should have looked at a series of ** relevant to your work ** that require a critical summary), ii) an important aspect of the field (so that many readers are interested in the review and there is enough material to write it), and:
iii) a well-defined question (otherwise you might include thousands of articles, which would render the review unhelpful).
Ideas for potential reviews may come from **[9], which provides a list of key research questions to be answered, but may also come from casual readings and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you should also choose a target audience. In many cases, the topic (e.g., web services in computational biology) will automatically define the audience (e.g., computational biologists), but adjacent fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.) may also be interested in the same topic. Once you've chosen your topic and audience, start reviewing the literature and relevance. Here are five suggestions:
i) document the search items you use (so that your search can be replicated[10]), ii) keep a list of pdf files whose files you do not have immediate access to (for later retrieval with other strategies), iii) use management systems (e.g. mendeley, *s, qiqqa, sente), iv) identify some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant early in the review process (these criteria can be described in the review to help determine their scope), and.
v) Don't just look for research in the field you want to review**, look for previous reviews as well.
There's a good chance that someone has already published a literature review (Figure 1), if not entirely for the problem you're trying to solve, then at least for a related topic. If there are already several literature reviews on your issue, my advice is not to give up and move on to your own literature review. (i) Discuss the methods, limitations, and conclusions of previous reviews in your review. (ii) attempts to find new perspectives that have not been adequately covered in previous reviews, and (iii) the inclusion of new material that has inevitably accumulated since their emergence. When searching for relevant ** and reviews in the literature, the usual rules apply: (i) to be thorough, (ii) to use different keywords and databases (e.g., dblp, Google Scholar, ISI proceedings, JStor Search, MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science) and (iii) to see who cited past relevant ** and book chapters. If you read first and then start writing reviews, you need a good memory to remember who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were. My advice when reading each article is that, as you read, start writing down interesting information, insights on how to structure your roundup, and ideas on what to write. This way, by the time you finish reading the literature of your choice, you already have a draft of the review. Of course, this draft will still require a lot of rewriting, reorganization, and rethinking to get a text with coherent arguments[11], but you will avoid the dangers that come with staring at a blank document. If you're copying word-for-word from a document on an ad hoc basis, be careful to use quotation marks when taking notes. It is advisable to rephrase these quotations in your own words in the final draft. It is important to note down references carefully at this stage to avoid misattribution. Using referencing software from the start will save you time.
After taking notes while reading the literature, you will have a rough idea of the amount of material available for review. This may be a good time to decide whether to write a small review or a comprehensive review. Some journals now tend to publish short reviews focused on the past few years, with limits on word count and citations. A mini-review is not necessarily a mini-review: it is likely to attract more attention from a busy reader, although it will inevitably simplify some questions and leave out some relevant material due to space constraints. The benefit of a comprehensive review is that there is more freedom to detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but it may be left in a very important pile of "to read" by readers who do not have time to read the main monograph.
There may be a continuous process between a small review and a full review. This also applies to the dichotomy between descriptive and comprehensive reviews. Descriptive reviews focus on the methods, results, and interpretation of each review study, while comprehensive reviews attempt to find common ideas and concepts from the review material [12]. A similar distinction exists between narrative and systematic reviews: narrative reviews are qualitative, while systematic reviews attempt to test a hypothesis based on published evidence that was collected using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [13,14]. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types must be made on a case-by-case basis, depending not only on the nature of the material found and the preference of the target journal, but also on the time available to write the review and the number of co-authors [15]. Whether your plan is to write a small or full review, staying focused is good advice [16,17]. If you're just writing material for the sake of writing it, it's easy to lead to the review trying to do too many things at the same time. For interdisciplinary reviews, it can be problematic to maintain the focus of the review, as the purpose of interdisciplinary review is to eliminate differences across fields [18]. For example, if you're writing a review of how epidemiological methods can be used to model the spread of ideas, you might be inclined to include material from both the fields of epidemiology and cultural communication studies. This may be necessary to some extent, but in this case, focused reviews will only deal in detail with those studies that are between epidemiology and cultural transmission. While focus is an important feature of a successful review, this requirement must be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a wide audience. This requirement must be balanced with the need to make the review relevant to a wide audience. This can be delineated by discussing the broader implications of the topics reviewed for other disciplines. Reviewing literature is not philately. A good review is not just about summarizing the literature, but about critically reviewing the literature, identifying methodological issues, and pointing out research gaps [19]. After reading the literature review, the reader should have a general idea of:
i) the main achievements in the areas reviewed, (ii) the main areas of controversy, and (iii) unresolved research questions. Successful reviews on all of these aspects are challenging. One workaround could be to involve a complementary group of authors: some are good at portraying what has been achieved, some are very good at identifying clouds on the horizon, and some are good at solutions. If your journal club has such a team, then you should definitely write a literature review! In addition to critical thinking, a literature review also requires coherence, such as the choice of passive and active voices and present and past tenses. Like a well-baked cake, a good review has many distinguishing features: it is worthy of the reader's time, it is timely, it is systematic, it is well-written, it is focused, and it is critical. It also needs a good structure. For reviews, it is often not feasible to break down the research** into introductions, methods, results, and discussions, or is rarely used. However, a general introduction to the background, as well as a summary of the main points covered and the information gained at the end, is also meaningful in the review. There is a trend towards systematic reviews to include information on how the literature was searched (databases, keywords, time constraints) [20].
How do you organize the flow of the main body of the review so that the reader is engaged and guided to read? In general, it is helpful to draw a conceptual review scheme with mind mapping techniques. Such a diagram can help to recognize a logical way to arrange and connect the various parts of the review [21]. This is not only at the writing stage, but also for the reader, and if the chart is included as a figure in the review, it will also have an impact on the reader. Careful selection of figures and figures that are relevant to the topic of the review is also of great help in the structure of the article [22]. It is true that literature reviews are often subject to peer review in the same way as studies** [23]. As a rule, taking feedback from reviewers into account can go a long way in improving the review draft. Reviewers may find inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities after reading the review with a new mindset that the authors did not notice as a result of re-reading. However, it's best to reread it again before submitting your manuscript, as correcting typos, jumps, and jumbled sentences at the last minute may leave reviewers focused on advising on the content rather than the form.
Feedback is essential to writing a good review, and feedback should be sought from different colleagues to get a different perspective on the draft. In some cases, this can lead to conflicting opinions about the merits and how to improve, but this is better than no feedback. Multiple feedback perspectives on a literature review can help determine the place of consensus views in the current scientific understanding of an issue [24]. In many cases, literature reviewers publish research that is relevant to the review they are writing. This can create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers objectively report on their own work [25]? Some scientists may be overzealous with what they publish and therefore risk giving too much weight to their findings in the review. However, bias can also occur in the other direction: some scientists may overly downplay their own accomplishments to the point that they tend to downplay their contributions, if any, when reviewing a field. Overall, a review of the literature should neither be a public relations manual nor a competitive self-denial. If a reviewer is up to the task, writing a well-organized, well-organized review that is coherent and serves the reader, then he or she should be objective when commenting on his or her findings. In reviews written by multiple authors, this can be achieved by assigning a review of the results of one co-author to different co-authors.
Given the gradual acceleration of scientific publishing, today's literature reviews require an understanding not only of the general direction and achievements of a field of study, but also of the latest research so that they do not become obsolete before they are published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify a question that has just been solved in a series of ** as the main research gap (of course, this also applies to older, neglected studies ()."Sleeping Beauty"[26])) This means that it is advisable for the literature reviewer to keep an eye on the electronic list of the ** being published, as it may take several months for these ** to appear in the scientific database. Some literature reviews claim that they have skimmed through the literature at some point in time, but given that peer review can be a fairly lengthy process, it may be worthwhile to conduct a comprehensive search of emerging literature during the revision phase. Assessing the contributions of emerging ** is particularly challenging, as there is little angle from which to measure their significance and impact on further research and society.
Inevitably, after the review is published, new ** (including independently authored literature reviews) on the subject of the review will emerge from all sides, so it may be necessary to update the review soon. But this is the essence of science [27-32]. Good luck to all of you in writing your literature review.
Figure 1Depending on the number of published studies** and the number of literature reviews, a concept map of different types of literature reviews is required. The number of studies** and literature reviews, different types of literature reviews are needed. The situation in the lower right corner (more literature reviews and less research**) is not just a theoretical situation; For example, it applies to studies on the effects of climate change on plant diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than studies [33].
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