How to Write Review of Literature Science Fair
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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 can provide inspiration for one'south own inquiry, as well equally 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 conclusion (see 'Tools and techniques'). Then 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 Academy, Singapore.
When I was a inquiry student, review writing improved my understanding of the history of my field. I also 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 nosotros understood how cells actively sense, interact with and adapt to nanoparticles used in drug delivery. This experience motivated me to written report how the surface properties of nanoparticles tin be modified to enhance biological sensing. When I transitioned to my postdoctoral research, this question led me to discover the role of cell-membrane curvature, which led to publications and my electric current enquiry focus. I wouldn't take started in this surface area without writing that review.
A common problem for students writing their first reviews is being overly ambitious. When I wrote mine, I imagined producing a comprehensive summary of every single type of nanomaterial used in biological applications. Information technology concluded up becoming a colossal piece of piece of work, with as well many papers discussed and without a clear style to categorize them. We published the work in the cease, only decided to limit the word strictly to nanoparticles for biological sensing, rather than covering how different nanomaterials are used in biology.
My advice to students is to take that a review is different a textbook: it should offer a more focused discussion, and information technology'due south OK to skip some topics so that yous do not distract your readers. Students should besides consider editorial deadlines, peculiarly for invited reviews: make sure that the review's telescopic is non and then extensive that it delays the writing.
A skilful review should also avert jargon and explain the basic concepts for someone who is new to the field. Although I trained as an engineer, I'grand interested in biological science, and my research is about developing nanomaterials to manipulate proteins at the cell membrane and how this can bear on ageing and cancer. As an 'outsider', the reviews that I notice virtually 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 procedure and develop your style
Associate professor of chemistry, University of Chicago, Illinois.
In my lab, we first past request: what is the purpose of this review? My reasons for writing 1 tin can include the chance to contribute insights to the scientific community and identify opportunities for my inquiry. I as well encounter review writing equally a way to railroad train early-career researchers in soft skills such as project management and leadership. This is especially truthful for lead authors, because they will learn to work with their co-authors to integrate the various sections into a piece with smooth transitions and no overlaps.
Afterwards we have identified the need and purpose of a review article, I will course a team from the researchers in my lab. I try to include students with different areas of expertise, considering 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.
After this, I will talk over an outline with my squad. We go through multiple iterations to make sure that we have scanned the literature sufficiently and exercise not echo discussions that have appeared in other reviews. It is too important that the outline is non decided by me alone: students often accept fresh ideas that they can bring to the table. Once this is done, nosotros go along with the writing.
I oft remind my students to imagine themselves equally 'artists of science' and encourage them to develop how they write and present information. Calculation more words isn't ever the best way: for example, I bask using tables to summarize enquiry progress and advise time to come research trajectories. I've also considered including short videos in our review papers to highlight key aspects of the work. I think this tin can increase readership and accessibility because these videos tin can be hands 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 all-time proposals are timely and conspicuously explain why readers should pay attending to the proposed topic.
Information technology is not enough for a review to exist a summary of the latest growth in the literature: the most interesting reviews instead provide a discussion about disagreements in the field.
Scientists oft middle the story of their primary research papers around their figures — but when information technology comes to reviews, figures often take a secondary role. In my opinion, review figures are more important than most people call up. I of my favourite review-manner manufactures3 presents a plot bringing together information from multiple research papers (many of which directly contradict each other). This is then used to identify broad trends and advise underlying mechanisms that could explain all of the different conclusions.
An of import role of a review article is to introduce researchers to a field. For this, schematic figures tin can be useful to illustrate the science beingness discussed, in much the aforementioned way every bit the first slide of a talk should. That is why, at Nature Reviews, we have in-firm illustrators to assistance authors. Still, simplicity is central, and fifty-fifty without support from professional person illustrators, researchers can still make use of many free drawing tools to heighten 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
Enquiry assistant professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Engineering, Daejeon.
I started writing the review 'Biosynthesis of inorganic nanomaterials using microbial cells and bacteriophages'iv as a PhD student in 2018. It took me i year to write the first draft because I was working on the review aslope my PhD enquiry and mostly on my ain, with support from my adviser. It took a further twelvemonth to complete the processes of peer review, revision and publication. During this time, many new papers and even competing reviews were published. To provide the most upwardly-to-date and original review, I had to stay abreast of the literature. In my case, I made use of Google Scholar, which I set to send 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 every bit leaner to produce nanomaterials, which was the subject area of my PhD research. Bacteria such as these are known as biofactories: that is, organisms that produce biological textile which tin can be modified to produce useful materials, such as magnetic nanoparticles for drug-delivery purposes.
However, when the first peer-review written report came back, all three reviewers suggested expanding the review to cover another type of biofactory: bacteriophages. These are essentially viruses that infect bacteria, and they can also produce nanomaterials.
The feedback eventually 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 great addition considering it made the review more comprehensive.
Writing the review also led me to an thought about using nanomaterial-modified microorganisms to produce chemicals, which I'm still researching now.
PAULA MARTIN-GONZALEZ: Brand expert employ of engineering science
PhD student, University of Cambridge, UK.
Only 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 trend in which some papers were consistently beingness cited by many other papers in the field. Information technology was clear to me that those papers must be important, but every bit a new fellow member of the field of integrated cancer biology, it was hard to immediately find and read all of these 'seminal papers'.
That was when I decided to lawmaking a small application to make my literature research more than 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 as PubMed that characteristic these fundamental words.
The code 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 have many citation relationships with other papers in the search, and could therefore be called seminal papers.
My code has essentially improved how I organize papers and has informed me of key publications and discoveries in my research field: something that would have taken more than time and feel in the field otherwise. After I shared my code on GitHub, I received feedback that it tin can exist daunting for researchers who are non 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 citation 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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