How to Do a Literature Review for Your Scientific Paper Introduction
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Literature reviews are important resources for scientists. They provide historical context for a field while offering opinions on its future trajectory. Creating them tin provide inspiration for ane'south own research, as well as some practice in writing. Only few scientists are trained in how to write a review — or in what constitutes an excellent one. Fifty-fifty picking the appropriate software to use can exist an involved decision (run into 'Tools and techniques'). So Nature asked editors and working scientists with well-cited reviews for their tips.
WENTING ZHAO: Exist focused and avoid jargon
Assistant professor of chemical and biomedical applied science, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.
When I was a research pupil, review writing improved my agreement of the history of my field. I as well learnt about unmet challenges in the field that triggered ideas.
For example, while writing my start reviewone as a PhD educatee, I was frustrated by how poorly nosotros understood how cells actively sense, interact with and arrange to nanoparticles used in drug delivery. This experience motivated me to study how the surface properties of nanoparticles can exist modified to enhance biological sensing. When I transitioned to my postdoctoral research, this question led me to discover the function of prison 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 first reviews is existence overly ambitious. When I wrote mine, I imagined producing a comprehensive summary of every single blazon of nanomaterial used in biological applications. It ended up becoming a colossal work, with too many papers discussed and without a clear fashion to categorize them. Nosotros published the work in the end, but decided to limit the discussion strictly to nanoparticles for biological sensing, rather than roofing how unlike nanomaterials are used in biology.
My advice to students is to have that a review is dissimilar a textbook: it should offer a more focused word, and it'due south OK to skip some topics so that yous do not distract your readers. Students should also consider editorial deadlines, especially for invited reviews: make sure that the review's telescopic is not so all-encompassing that it delays the writing.
A practiced review should also avert jargon and explicate the basic concepts for someone who is new to the field. Although I trained as an engineer, I'yard interested in biology, and my research is most developing nanomaterials to manipulate proteins at the cell membrane and how this can affect ageing and cancer. As an 'outsider', the reviews that I observe most 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: Accept a process and develop your manner
Acquaintance professor of chemistry, University of Chicago, Illinois.
In my lab, nosotros starting time past asking: what is the purpose of this review? My reasons for writing one tin include the chance to contribute insights to the scientific community and identify opportunities for my research. I as well run across review writing as a style to train early-career researchers in soft skills such as project management and leadership. This is especially true for atomic number 82 authors, because they volition learn to work with their co-authors to integrate the diverse sections into a piece with smooth transitions and no overlaps.
Afterwards we take identified the need and purpose of a review article, I will class a team from the researchers in my lab. I try to include students with dissimilar areas of expertise, because it is useful to become a multifariousness of perspectives. For example, in the review 'An atlas of nano-enabled neural interfaces'2, nosotros had authors with backgrounds in biophysics, neuroengineering, neurobiology and materials sciences focusing on unlike sections of the review.
After this, I will discuss an outline with my team. We go through multiple iterations to make certain that nosotros have scanned the literature sufficiently and do non echo discussions that accept appeared in other reviews. It is besides important that the outline is non decided by me alone: students ofttimes have fresh ideas that they tin bring to the tabular array. In one case this is done, we proceed with the writing.
I often remind my students to imagine themselves as 'artists of scientific discipline' and encourage them to develop how they write and present information. Calculation more words isn't ever the all-time way: for case, I relish using tables to summarize research progress and suggest time to come inquiry trajectories. I've also considered including short videos in our review papers to highlight key aspects of the work. I think this tin increment readership and accessibility considering these videos can exist 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 periodical editor is to evaluate proposals for reviews. The best proposals are timely and conspicuously explain why readers should pay attending to the proposed topic.
It is not enough for a review to be a summary of the latest growth in the literature: the most interesting reviews instead provide a word about disagreements in the field.
Scientists often centre the story of their primary enquiry papers around their figures — but when information technology comes to reviews, figures often take a secondary office. In my stance, review figures are more than important than most people think. 1 of my favourite review-style articlesiii presents a plot bringing together data from multiple inquiry papers (many of which directly contradict each other). This is and then used to identify broad trends and suggest underlying mechanisms that could explain all of the different conclusions.
An important function of a review article is to introduce researchers to a field. For this, schematic figures tin can exist useful to illustrate the science being discussed, in much the aforementioned way as the first slide of a talk should. That is why, at Nature Reviews, we take in-business firm illustrators to assist authors. However, simplicity is key, and even without support from professional illustrators, researchers can still make use of many free drawing tools to enhance the value of their review figures.
Yoojin Choi recommends that researchers be open to critiques when writing reviews. Credit: Yoojin Choi
YOOJIN CHOI: Stay updated and be open to suggestions
Research banana professor, Korea Avant-garde 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. It took me one year to write the first draft because I was working on the review alongside my PhD research and by and large on my own, with support from my adviser. It took a farther twelvemonth 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 nearly upwardly-to-date and original review, I had to stay beside of the literature. In my case, I made utilise of Google Scholar, which I set to send me daily updates of relevant literature based on key words.
Through my review-writing procedure, I also learnt to be more open to critiques to raise the value and increment the readership of my work. Initially, my review was focused only on using microbial cells such as bacteria to produce nanomaterials, which was the subject of my PhD research. Bacteria such as these are known equally biofactories: that is, organisms that produce biological cloth which can be modified to produce useful materials, such equally magnetic nanoparticles for drug-commitment purposes.
However, when the first peer-review report came back, all iii reviewers suggested expanding the review to embrace another type of biofactory: bacteriophages. These are substantially viruses that infect leaner, and they can also produce nanomaterials.
The feedback somewhen led me to include a discussion of the differences between the various biofactories (bacteriophages, bacteria, fungi and microalgae) and their advantages and disadvantages. This turned out to be a great addition because it made the review more than comprehensive.
Writing the review besides led me to an idea about using nanomaterial-modified microorganisms to produce chemicals, which I'm however researching now.
PAULA MARTIN-GONZALEZ: Make good use 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 improve ovarian cancer management.
As I was researching the review, I noticed a tendency in which some papers were consistently being cited by many other papers in the field. It was clear to me that those papers must exist important, but as a new member of the field of integrated cancer biological science, information technology was difficult to immediately find and read all of these 'seminal papers'.
That was when I decided to code a small-scale application to brand my literature research more efficient. Using my code, users tin enter a query, such as 'ovarian cancer, calculator tomography, radiomics', and the application searches for all relevant literature archived in databases such equally PubMed that feature these key words.
The lawmaking and then 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 accept many commendation 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 central publications and discoveries in my research field: something that would have taken more time and experience in the field otherwise. Later on I shared my lawmaking 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 course of a web page, alike to PubMed or Google Scholar, where users tin but input their queries to generate commendation graphs.
Interviews take been edited for length and clarity.
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Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03422-x
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