Is It Ok to Look at Other Review Articles When Writing a Review Article
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Literature reviews are important resources for scientists. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its hereafter trajectory. Creating them can provide inspiration for one's own inquiry, as well as some practice in writing. Merely few scientists are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Even picking the appropriate software to apply can be an involved decision (encounter 'Tools and techniques'). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips.
WENTING ZHAO: Exist focused and avert jargon
Assistant professor of chemical and biomedical technology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
When I was a research student, review writing improved my understanding of the history of my field. I likewise learnt about unmet challenges in the field that triggered ideas.
For example, while writing my first review1 as a PhD student, I was frustrated by how poorly we understood how cells actively sense, collaborate with and adapt to nanoparticles used in drug commitment. This experience motivated me to written report how the surface properties of nanoparticles can be modified to enhance biological sensing. When I transitioned to my postdoctoral research, this question led me to observe the role of cell-membrane curvature, which led to publications and my current research focus. I wouldn't have started in this area without writing that review.
A mutual problem for students writing their outset reviews is being overly aggressive. When I wrote mine, I imagined producing a comprehensive summary of every single type of nanomaterial used in biological applications. Information technology ended up condign a jumbo piece of piece of work, with as well many papers discussed and without a clear way to categorize them. We published the work in the end, but decided to limit the discussion strictly to nanoparticles for biological sensing, rather than covering how unlike nanomaterials are used in biology.
My advice to students is to take that a review is unlike a textbook: it should offer a more than focused discussion, and it'due south OK to skip some topics so that you do not distract your readers. Students should as well consider editorial deadlines, especially for invited reviews: brand sure that the review's telescopic is not so all-encompassing that it delays the writing.
A skillful review should also avert jargon and explain the bones concepts for someone who is new to the field. Although I trained as an engineer, I'g interested in biology, and my enquiry is almost developing nanomaterials to manipulate proteins at the jail cell membrane and how this can affect ageing and cancer. As an 'outsider', the reviews that I detect well-nigh useful for these biological topics are those that speak to me in accessible scientific language.
Bozhi Tian likes to get a variety of perspectives into a review. Credit: Aleksander Prominski
BOZHI TIAN: Have a process and develop your style
Associate professor of chemistry, University of Chicago, Illinois.
In my lab, we start by asking: what is the purpose of this review? My reasons for writing one can include the take a chance to contribute insights to the scientific customs and identify opportunities for my research. I besides see review writing every bit a manner to train early on-career researchers in soft skills such as project management and leadership. This is peculiarly truthful for lead authors, because they volition learn to work with their co-authors to integrate the various sections into a piece with smooth transitions and no overlaps.
After we have identified the demand and purpose of a review article, I will grade a team from the researchers in my lab. I try to include students with different areas of expertise, because it is useful to get a variety of perspectives. For example, in the review 'An atlas of nano-enabled neural interfaces'2, we had authors with backgrounds in biophysics, neuroengineering, neurobiology and materials sciences focusing on different sections of the review.
Later on this, I will talk over an outline with my squad. We go through multiple iterations to brand sure that we accept scanned the literature sufficiently and do not repeat discussions that have appeared in other reviews. It is also important that the outline is non decided by me alone: students often have fresh ideas that they can bring to the table. One time this is washed, we go along with the writing.
I frequently remind my students to imagine themselves every bit 'artists of science' and encourage them to develop how they write and present information. Calculation more words isn't always the best way: for example, I savor using tables to summarize inquiry progress and suggest future research trajectories. I've likewise considered including short videos in our review papers to highlight key aspects of the piece of work. I remember this can increment readership and accessibility considering these videos can be easily shared on social-media platforms.
ANKITA ANIRBAN: Timeliness and figures make a huge difference
Editor, Nature Reviews Physics.
One of my roles as a journal editor is to evaluate proposals for reviews. The all-time proposals are timely and clearly explain why readers should pay attention to the proposed topic.
It is non plenty for a review to be a summary of the latest growth in the literature: the about interesting reviews instead provide a discussion about disagreements in the field.
Scientists oftentimes center the story of their main research papers around their figures — just when it comes to reviews, figures often take a secondary function. In my opinion, review figures are more of import than most people recollect. One of my favourite review-manner articlesthree presents a plot bringing together data from multiple research papers (many of which direct contradict each other). This is and so used to identify broad trends and suggest underlying mechanisms that could explain all of the dissimilar conclusions.
An important role of a review commodity is to introduce researchers to a field. For this, schematic figures can be useful to illustrate the science being discussed, in much the same way as the first slide of a talk should. That is why, at Nature Reviews, we have in-business firm illustrators to assistance authors. However, simplicity is fundamental, and even without back up from professional illustrators, researchers can still brand employ of many free drawing tools to enhance the value of their review figures.
Yoojin Choi recommends that researchers be open up to critiques when writing reviews. Credit: Yoojin Choi
YOOJIN CHOI: Stay updated and be open to suggestions
Inquiry assistant professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon.
I started writing the review 'Biosynthesis of inorganic nanomaterials using microbial cells and bacteriophages'4 as a PhD student in 2018. Information technology took me i twelvemonth to write the first draft considering I was working on the review alongside my PhD research and mostly on my own, with support from my adviser. Information technology took a further year to complete the processes of peer review, revision and publication. During this fourth dimension, many new papers and fifty-fifty competing reviews were published. To provide the most up-to-date and original review, I had to stay abreast of the literature. In my case, I fabricated use of Google Scholar, which I set to transport me daily updates of relevant literature based on key words.
Through my review-writing process, I also learnt to be more open to critiques to enhance the value and increase the readership of my work. Initially, my review was focused only on using microbial cells such as bacteria to produce nanomaterials, which was the discipline of my PhD research. Bacteria such as these are known equally biofactories: that is, organisms that produce biological material which tin be modified to produce useful materials, such as magnetic nanoparticles for drug-commitment purposes.
However, when the first peer-review study came back, all iii reviewers suggested expanding the review to cover another blazon of biofactory: bacteriophages. These are essentially viruses that infect bacteria, and they can also produce nanomaterials.
The feedback somewhen led me to include a discussion of the differences betwixt the diverse biofactories (bacteriophages, bacteria, fungi and microalgae) and their advantages and disadvantages. This turned out to be a keen improver because it made the review more than comprehensive.
Writing the review also led me to an idea about using nanomaterial-modified microorganisms to produce chemicals, which I'thou still researching now.
PAULA MARTIN-GONZALEZ: Make expert apply of technology
PhD student, University of Cambridge, UK.
Just before the coronavirus lockdown, my PhD adviser and I decided to write a literature review discussing the integration of medical imaging with genomics to better ovarian cancer direction.
As I was researching the review, I noticed a tendency in which some papers were consistently beingness cited by many other papers in the field. It was articulate to me that those papers must be important, only as a new member of the field of integrated cancer biology, information technology was difficult to immediately find and read all of these 'seminal papers'.
That was when I decided to code a modest application to make my literature inquiry more efficient. Using my code, users tin can enter a query, such equally 'ovarian cancer, computer tomography, radiomics', and the application searches for all relevant literature archived in databases such equally PubMed that feature these cardinal words.
The lawmaking and so identifies the relevant papers and creates a citation graph of all the references cited in the results of the search. The software highlights papers that have many citation relationships with other papers in the search, and could therefore be called seminal papers.
My code has substantially improved how I organize papers and has informed me of fundamental publications and discoveries in my research field: something that would have taken more than time and experience in the field otherwise. Afterwards I shared my code on GitHub, I received feedback that it can be daunting for researchers who are not used to coding. Consequently, I am hoping to build a more user-friendly interface in a form of a web page, akin to PubMed or Google Scholar, where users can simply input their queries to generate commendation graphs.
Interviews take been edited for length and clarity.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03422-x
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