The papers authored by the people who analyse, and discuss their own data, are known as primary literature. They, among other sources, are the base of the review papers, in which the authors did not carry out the experiments or formulate the conclusion of every source that they chose. These papers are known as secondary literature where their authors condense dispersed knowledge, synthesize information, provide selected references, criticize published literature, present the state of the art, and pose new trends.
It is assumed that the selected material in a review paper complies with the criteria of plausibility, as its presented background, techniques, and science, are well-sustained. Therefore, the main difference in the refereeing process of a research paper compared to a review one deals with the flexibility regarding its originality in the presented material to be analysed and discussed. However, the newness of the discussion and its rigorousness must be maintained.
Writing a review paper seems simple considering that the experiments, their results, and other elements for discussion are already published, most likely after a peer-review process. It also looks attractive to write them because they used to be the starting point of research, so they become part of the introduction and background of other documents, such as the thesis, and tend to be highly cited. However, writing a review requires more than collecting papers on a common subject. The results of even peer-reviewed published original research are within the specific conditions of the experiments conducted to formulate their conclusions, but they do not always offer sufficient details to make comparisons among the papers and assemble a set of data, as all of them were from the same source, to be analysed. Therefore, one of the challenges of the authors of review papers is they become referees while seeking, finding, and choosing the references for their reviews. This is one of the reasons why these documents used to be written by expert authors who already built their outstanding reputations with other primary literature published by them.
There are journals that are composed mostly of review papers, others consider them as a type of paper that deserves to be processed within a peer-review system, while for others they are out of their scope. Refereeing review papers presents some difficulties because there are several factors that affect the perception of their quality. Once the validity of the selected material for the review is granted, the next criticism considers the sense of the relevance of the selected material, the novelty of the discussion, and the contribution of the review to the science and the arts of the referred subject.
It would be very useful to have a manual with rules for writing papers ready to be accepted for publication, but that is rather complex since the production of a manuscript involves more than writing skills. However, just by looking on the internet, there are a lot of suggestions about how to write a review paper, with rather typical pieces of advice that are usually known by the experts.
There exists a great variety of published review papers that in terms of perceived relevance and rigorousness some authors are wondering why their submissions, not only review manuscripts, were not accepted for publication, while some readers, even authors in that role, speculate about why other than theirs were accepted and published. Some clues to answer those legitimate questions might be elucidated by describing some cases of the review papers.
The paper supplies references that might be a starting point for conducting an extended literature review and playing and introductory role. There are cases where summaries of these papers or their presentation of the state of the art become the introduction of original literature. They might save a lot of reading time for those with the appropriate background who would like to keep updated. In this case, they might be useful in the re-starting of lines of knowledge generation because they organize the available dispersed material.
The paper is aimed to test a hypothesis and the authors compile evidence from different sources to prove it. This kind of paper is similar in structure to a research paper and might be evaluated using the same criteria, but the originality of the sources.
The paper deals with material that consists mostly of self-citations. In this case, it is more of a compendium that most probably would fit better as a book chapter.
The paper includes everything from the material to be discussed with the necessary background to understand it, and then the review itself. This kind of paper is quite attractive for some readers, but it is commonly too long so it is a probable candidate for a book chapter.
The paper does not discuss the presented material, it just enlists it, showing the original conclusion, without providing anything new. In this case, the material is ordered by group or chronological, so that the document might be useful to build a historical line. It is common that science and technology issues are left out.
The given description only shows some of the ways that the papers might be perceived. The submissions with the best opportunity are those dealing with subjects that somehow are attractive by themselves, it could be due to their novelty, their presence through commercialized items related to them, or that they are of current interest after certain events with wide exposition happened. The review papers that seem to deal with everything within a subject so that can be browsed to seek information like on the internet are also attractive, although the most general ones could lack novelty, yet it gets compensated by the sense of having complete information with easy words for explaining complicated issues. The reviews should be clear in presenting what they offer and delivering it. The position of the authors must be clearly stated, especially on controversial issues, since most likely the readers are seeking for such kind of contributions. Finally, although it seems obvious, the authors of the review papers are specialists who can conduct objective and unbiased reviews and write convincing arguments within their area of specialty. Then they should select the journal that best complies with their specialty, rather than forcing their paper to fit a journal selected for some other reason, because that limits the chance to show the real contribution of the authors who thought and wrote this kind of paper.
Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León, Facutad de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica, NL, Mexico
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Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).