How to write a review article for publication

What is a review article?

A review article is an article for publication that basically summarizes the ongoing state of findings and understandings on a certain topic. It is also defined as secondary research as it puts together all the important results and methodologies that are already published in the form of research articles. Instead of referring to newly developed facts or results, it evaluates the already found results and summarises them in a way that some conclusions come out. 

Types of a review article for publication

There are three types of review articles- (I) Literature review (II) Scoping review (III) systematic review. However, among students and early-stage researchers literature review and systematic review are more popular.

">Literature review - This is a review article that summarizes what has been done so far on a topic by researchers and scholars. In the literature review paper, the main focus is to update the reader on the up-to-date information and also discuss the merits and demerits. From the academic point of view, a literature review must have a guiding concept - objective, problem, or issue and an argumentive thesis.

Scoping review - Scoping review is done or it summarizes the concepts that did not receive much attention to date. The main focus is to identify and analyze the nature and extent of the research evidence.

Systematic review - the review which collects all the published evidence to answer one question or to solve one specific problem is referred to as systematic review. There are some key characteristics of systematic review- 

• A clearly defined question
• In depth and rigorous search of literature review
• Filtration of all the collected papers based on year, topic, and publication types
• Interpretation of results
• A well-written report for publication

To help you understand more, two examples of review papers are given below.  

     Literature Review                            Systematic Review

Basic structure of a review article

The basic structure of a review article is very simple. There must be at least four sections. However, depending on the topic, there may be more than four sections. The major three sections are 

• introduction- where you write the background of your study
• Body - where you cite important published articles or you do the literature review
• Conclusion- where you write the findings from your review
• Reference- where you cite the literature

 

How to write a review article

This is the most important part of this article where you learn how to write an outstanding review article. There are several steps those you must follow step by step to write a publishable review article. Steps are-

1. First, you need to decide whether you want to write a literature review or a systematic review. You need to think deeply about the topic and then decide whether it falls under literature or systematic review.
2. Choose a title for your paper. the title must be attractive and should be a one-line summary of the whole paper. 
3. collect all the reference papers regarding your topic. Then, only take the papers of the last 5-10 years and get rid of the rest of the papers. 
4. start doing the literature review or writing the body of the paper. Discuss all the important updates and developments and also try to find some results from your discussion.
5. Finally, point out all the major discussion topics or results.

 

Length of a review article and number of references 

This is one of the questions which comes to everyone's mind when they first start writing a review article. A review article does not have any specific page or word limit. Depending on your topic an article can be from 5 pages to 50 pages or even more. however, some journals sometimes put some limitations on the number of words and page limits, and the number of figures. The standard limit are mentioned below-

• Title- 100 words or less
• Abstract - 200-250 words
• Body - 6000-30000 words
• Conclusion- 200-300 words
• Reference- There is no limit to the number of references of a review article. In the general case, the higher the better. However, do not add any unnecessary references. 

 

The post-writing process

After you finish the writing process, you have to do some more work on your paper to proofread it (get rid of all the errors). For proofreading the below parameters must be checked

• Punctuation
• Grammar
• Sentence structure
• Typing mistakes
• spelling mistakes 
• systematic error
• formatting of the paper

 

Where do I publish my paper? 

The last and one of the most important steps is to select a journal to publish your paper. This step is very crucial because, if you select the wrong journal and publish your paper in the garbage all your hard work will go in vain. papers published in a wrong/predatory journal is worst than not having a journal paper. To know where to publish your paper and how, read This article. 

What to do when your paper is published

Great, now your paper is published. This is time to add your paper to your CV. There are some specific formats for how you put your article in your CV. The format is shown in the below figure.

In figure 5 referencing styles are shown. You can use any style you want. Take a look very carefully at the writing style of author names, dates, page numbers, and journal names are varying with different styles.