Literature Review Tables With More Than One Author

• Loading metrics

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

• Marco Pautasso

x

• Published: July eighteen, 2013
• https://doi.org/ten.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

Figures

Citation: Pautasso Chiliad (2013) Ten Uncomplicated Rules for Writing a Literature Review. PLoS Comput Biol 9(7): e1003149. https://doi.org/ten.1371/journal.pcbi.1003149

Editor: Philip Eastward. Bourne, University of California San Diego, U.s. of America

Published: July 18, 2013

Copyright: © 2013 Marco Pautasso. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted employ, distribution, and reproduction in whatsoever 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 Centre for Synthesis and Assay of Biodiversity information (CESAB), as role of the NETSEED research project. The funders had no part in the preparation of the manuscript.

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

Literature reviews are in peachy need in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications [i]. For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more than papers were indexed in Spider 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 newspaper relevant to their interests [iii]. Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the contempo literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from chief inquiry, timely literature reviews tin atomic number 82 to new constructed insights and are often widely read [4]. For such summaries to exist useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way [v].

When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can crave a titanic amount of work. That is why researchers who take spent their career working on a certain research effect are in a perfect position to review that literature. Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their projection by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research consequence [6]. However, it is likely that nigh scientists have not idea in item most how to approach and carry out a literature review.

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

Dominion 1: Define a Topic and Audience

How to cull which topic to review? There are so many issues in gimmicky science that y'all could spend a lifetime of attending conferences and reading the literature simply pondering what to review. On the ane hand, if you have several years to choose, several other people may have had the same thought in the meantime. On the other manus, only a well-considered topic is likely to atomic number 82 to a brilliant literature review [8]. The topic must at least be:

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

Ideas for potential reviews may come up from papers providing lists of key inquiry questions to be answered [nine], simply also from serendipitous moments during sporadic reading and discussions. In addition to choosing your topic, you lot should also select a target audition. In many cases, the topic (e.m., web services in computational biology) will automatically ascertain an audience (e.k., computational biologists), but that aforementioned topic may also be of interest to neighbouring fields (e.g., computer science, biology, etc.).

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

After having called your topic and audience, start by checking the literature and downloading relevant papers. 5 pieces of communication here:

1. go along track of the search items you use (and so that your search tin exist replicated [10]),
2. proceed a listing of papers whose pdfs yous cannot admission immediately (and then as to recall them later with culling strategies),
3. employ a paper management system (e.g., Mendeley, Papers, Qiqqa, Sente),
4. define early on in the process some criteria for exclusion of irrelevant papers (these criteria tin can then be described in the review to help define its telescopic), and
5. do not just look for research papers in the area you wish to review, only also seek previous reviews.

The chances are high that someone volition already have published a literature review (Figure 1), if non exactly on the issue you are planning to tackle, at least on a related topic. If at that place are already a few or several reviews of the literature on your upshot, my advice is not to give up, but to carry on with your own literature review,

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

The bottom-right state of affairs (many literature reviews merely few enquiry papers) is non just a theoretical situation; it applies, for example, to the written report of the impacts of climate alter on constitute diseases, where there appear to be more literature reviews than research studies [33].

https://doi.org/x.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 fairly 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. use different keywords and database sources (due east.g., DBLP, Google Scholar, ISI Proceedings, JSTOR Search, Medline, Scopus, Web of Science), and
3. expect at who has cited past relevant papers and volume chapters.

Dominion 3: Take Notes While Reading

If you read the papers offset, and only afterwards kickoff writing the review, you will need a very expert retention to retrieve who wrote what, and what your impressions and associations were while reading each single newspaper. My advice is, while reading, to start writing down interesting pieces of information, insights nearly how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write. This way, by the fourth dimension you lot have read the literature you selected, yous will already have a rough typhoon of the review.

Of course, this draft will still need much rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to obtain a text with a coherent argument [11], but you will have avoided the danger posed by staring at a blank certificate. Exist careful when taking notes to use quotation marks if yous are provisionally copying verbatim from the literature. It is advisable then to reformulate such quotes with your own words in the final draft. Information technology is important to be conscientious in noting the references already at this stage, and then as to avoid misattributions. Using referencing software from the very kickoff of your effort will save you time.

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

After having taken notes while reading the literature, you will have a crude thought of the amount of cloth bachelor for the review. This is probably a expert time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a total review. Some journals are now favouring the publication of rather short reviews focusing on the last 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 attention from busy readers, although it will inevitably simplify some issues and exit out some relevant cloth due to space limitations. A full review volition have the advantage of more freedom to encompass in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development, but may and so be 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 full 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 study, integrative reviews endeavor 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 show, which is gathered using a predefined protocol to reduce bias [xiii], [14]. When systematic reviews analyse quantitative results in a quantitative way, they become meta-analyses. The choice between different review types will have to be made on a instance-by-instance basis, depending not just on the nature of the material institute and the preferences of the target periodical(s), but also on the time available to write the review and the number of coauthors [15].

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

Whether your plan is to write a mini- or a full review, information technology is skilful advice to go along it focused 16,17. Including material just for the sake of it can hands lead to reviews that are trying to do besides many things at one time. The need to keep a review focused can be problematic for interdisciplinary reviews, where the aim is to span the gap between fields [eighteen]. If yous are writing a review on, for case, 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, but in this example a focused review would merely deal in detail with those studies at the interface between epidemiology and the spread of ideas.

While focus is an of import 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 be circled by discussing the wider implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Dominion 6: Be Critical and Consistent

Reviewing the literature is not postage collecting. A adept review does not only summarize the literature, simply discusses information technology critically, identifies methodological problems, and points out research gaps [19]. After having read a review of the literature, a reader should accept a rough idea of:

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

Information technology is challenging to achieve a successful review on all these fronts. A solution tin be to involve a set of complementary coauthors: some people are fantabulous at mapping what has been accomplished, some others are very good at identifying nighttime clouds on the horizon, and some take instead a knack at predicting where solutions are going to come from. If your journal club has exactly this sort of team, 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 present vs. by tense.

Rule 7: Notice a Logical Structure

Like a crisp cake, a good review has a number of telling features: it is worth the reader'due south time, timely, systematic, well written, focused, and critical. Information technology also needs a good structure. With reviews, the usual subdivision of research papers into introduction, methods, results, and discussion does not work or is rarely used. Nevertheless, a general introduction of the context and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered and take-home messages make sense also in the case of reviews. For systematic reviews, in that location is a trend towards including data about how the literature was searched (database, keywords, time limits) [xx].

How can you organize the flow of the primary body of the review and so that the reader volition be drawn into and guided through it? It is generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, eastward.g., with heed-mapping techniques. Such diagrams can aid recognize a logical fashion to order and link the various sections of a review [21]. This is the case not just at the writing stage, but also for readers if the diagram is included in the review as a figure. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can be very helpful to structure the text too [22].

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are normally peer-reviewed in the same way every bit research papers, and rightly so [23]. As a rule, incorporating feedback from reviewers profoundly helps ameliorate 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. Information technology is withal advisable to reread the draft i more time earlier 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 skilful review, and should be sought from a variety of colleagues, so equally to obtain a multifariousness 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 information technology, merely such a situation is improve than the absenteeism of feedback. A diversity 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 upshot [24].

Dominion nine: Include Your Own Relevant Research, but 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 can reviewers report objectively on their own work [25]? Some scientists may exist overly enthusiastic about what they take published, and thus risk giving likewise much importance to their own findings in the review. Notwithstanding, bias could as well occur in the other direction: 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 cocky-denial. If a reviewer is up to the job of producing a well-organized and methodical review, which flows well and provides a service to the readership, then information technology 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 different coauthors.

Rule 10: Exist Upward-to-Date, but Do Non Forget Older Studies

Given the progressive acceleration in the publication of scientific papers, today's reviews of the literature demand awareness non just of the overall management and achievements of a field of inquiry, but also of the latest studies, so as not to become out-of-engagement before they have been published. Ideally, a literature review should not identify as a major research gap an event that has just been addressed in a serial of papers in printing (the same applies, of class, to older, overlooked studies ("sleeping beauties" [26])). This implies that literature reviewers would do well to continue an middle on electronic lists of papers in printing, given that it can accept months before these appear in scientific databases. Some reviews declare that they have scanned the literature up to a sure bespeak in time, simply given that peer review tin be a rather lengthy process, a total search for newly appeared literature at the revision stage may be worthwhile. Assessing the contribution of papers that have merely appeared is peculiarly challenging, considering there is little perspective with which to gauge their significance and impact on further inquiry and gild.

Inevitably, new papers on the reviewed topic (including independently written literature reviews) will appear from all quarters after 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 thank you to K. Barbosa, K. Dehnen-Schmutz, T. Döring, D. Fontaneto, G. Garbelotto, O. Holdenrieder, Grand. Jeger, D. Lonsdale, A. MacLeod, P. Mills, M. Moslonka-Lefebvre, G. 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.

References

1. 1. Rapple C (2011) The role of the critical review article in alleviating information overload. Annual Reviews White Paper. Available: http://www.annualreviews.org/userimages/ContentEditor/1300384004941/Annual_Reviews_WhitePaper_Web_2011.pdf. Accessed May 2013.
2. 2. Pautasso Yard (2010) Worsening file-drawer problem in the abstracts of natural, medical and social science databases. Scientometrics 85: 193–202
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
3. iii. Erren TC, Cullen P, Erren 1000 (2009) How to surf today's information seismic sea wave: on the arts and crafts of effective reading. Med Hypotheses 73: 278–279
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
4. 4. Hampton SE, Parker JN (2011) Collaboration and productivity in scientific synthesis. Bioscience 61: 900–910
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
5. 5. Ketcham CM, Crawford JM (2007) The impact of review manufactures. Lab Invest 87: 1174–1185
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
6. six. Boote DN, Beile P (2005) Scholars earlier researchers: on the centrality of the dissertation literature review in research grooming. Educ Res 34: iii–15
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
7. 7. Budgen D, Brereton P (2006) Performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering. Proc 28th Int Conf Software Technology, ACM New York, NY, USA, pp. 1051–1052. doi:https://doi.org/10.1145/1134285.1134500.
8. viii. Maier Hr (2013) What constitutes a good literature review and why does its quality affair? Environ Model Softw 43: iii–four
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
9. 9. Sutherland WJ, Fleishman E, Mascia MB, Pretty J, Rudd MA (2011) Methods for collaboratively identifying enquiry priorities and emerging issues in science and policy. Methods Ecol Evol 2: 238–247
   • View Article
   • Google Scholar
10. x. Maggio LA, Tannery NH, Kanter SL (2011) Reproducibility of literature search reporting in medical education reviews. Acad Med 86: 1049–1054
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
11. 11. Torraco RJ (2005) Writing integrative literature reviews: guidelines and examples. Man Res Develop Rev 4: 356–367
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
12. 12. Khoo CSG, Na JC, Jaidka K (2011) Analysis of the macro-level discourse structure of literature reviews. Online Info Rev 35: 255–271
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
13. xiii. Rosenfeld RM (1996) How to systematically review the medical literature. Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg 115: 53–63
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
14. 14. Cook DA, Due west CP (2012) Conducting systematic reviews in medical education: a stepwise approach. Med Educ 46: 943–952
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
15. fifteen. Dijkers M (2009) The Task Force on Systematic Reviews and Guidelines (2009) The value of "traditional" reviews in the era of systematic reviewing. Am J Phys Med Rehabil 88: 423–430
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
16. xvi. Eco U (1977) Come si fa una tesi di laurea. Milan: Bompiani.
17. 17. Hart C (1998) Doing a literature review: releasing the social scientific discipline enquiry imagination. London: SAGE.
18. eighteen. Wagner CS, Roessner JD, Bobb Chiliad, Klein JT, Boyack KW, et al. (2011) Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research (IDR): a review of the literature. J Informetr 5: 14–26
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
19. 19. Carnwell R, Daly Due west (2001) Strategies for the construction of a critical review of the literature. Nurse Educ Pract 1: 57–63
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
20. 20. Roberts PD, Stewart GB, Pullin AS (2006) Are review articles a reliable source of evidence to support conservation and environmental management? A comparison with medicine. Biol Conserv 132: 409–423
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
21. 21. Ridley D (2008) The literature review: a step-past-pace guide for students. London: SAGE.
22. 22. Kelleher C, Wagener T (2011) Ten guidelines for effective data visualization in scientific publications. Environ Model Softw 26: 822–827
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
23. 23. Oxman AD, Guyatt GH (1988) Guidelines for reading literature reviews. CMAJ 138: 697–703.
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
24. 24. May RM (2011) Scientific discipline as organized scepticism. Philos Trans A Math Phys Eng Sci 369: 4685–4689
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
25. 25. Logan DW, Sandal M, Gardner PP, Manske One thousand, Bateman A (2010) 10 elementary rules for editing Wikipedia. PLoS Comput Biol 6: e1000941
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
26. 26. van Raan AFJ (2004) Sleeping beauties in science. Scientometrics 59: 467–472
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
27. 27. Rosenberg D (2003) Early mod data overload. J Hist Ideas 64: ane–nine
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
28. 28. Bastian H, Glasziou P, Chalmers I (2010) Lxx-five trials and eleven systematic reviews a 24-hour interval: how will nosotros always keep upward? PLoS Med seven: e1000326
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
29. 29. Bertamini M, Munafò MR (2012) Bite-size science and its undesired side effects. Perspect Psychol Sci 7: 67–71
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
30. 30. Pautasso One thousand (2012) Publication growth in biological sub-fields: patterns, predictability and sustainability. Sustainability 4: 3234–3247
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
31. 31. Michels C, Schmoch U (2013) Impact of bibliometric studies on the publication behaviour of authors. Scientometrics
    • View Commodity
    • Google Scholar
32. 32. Tsafnat K, Dunn A, Glasziou P, Coiera Due east (2013) The automation of systematic reviews. BMJ 346: f139
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar
33. 33. Pautasso M, Döring TF, Garbelotto M, Pellis Fifty, Jeger MJ (2012) Impacts of climate modify on institute diseases - opinions and trends. Eur J Plant Pathol 133: 295–313
    • View Article
    • Google Scholar

tarryofflon.blogspot.com

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

Share this post