Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields, stemming from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications. Reviewing literature demands much work, especially when starting from scratch, necessitating the ability to juggle multiple tasks, including finding and evaluating relevant material and synthesizing information from different sources. It also demands skills such as critical thinking, paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation. Next are ten simple rules for writing a literature review.

Rule 1: Define a Topic and Audience

Choosing a topic and audience is central to writing a literature review. The topic must at least be:

?????? Interesting to you.

?????? An important aspect of the field, and

?????? A well-defined issue.

Rule 2: Search and Re-search the Literature

This rule involves checking relevant literature and downloading articles. Kindly follow these five pieces of advice:

?????? Keep track of the search items you use to avoid replication.

?????? Keep a list of articles whose PDFs are inaccessible immediately to retrieve later with alternative strategies; for example, use their Doi to access them via sci-hub.

?????? Use an article management system, such as Sente, Mendeley, Papers, and Qiqqa.

?????? Define early in the process some exclusion criteria for irrelevant articles and

?????? Do not just look for articles in the area you wish to review, but also seek previous reviews.

It is highly likely that someone has already published a literature review that is exactly like the issue you wish to tackle or a related topic. If you find multiple reviews of literature on your preferred issue, carry on with your literature review by,

?????? Discussing in your review the strategies, limitations, and conclusions of past reviews,

?????? Trying to identify a new angle that has not been covered sufficiently in the past reviews and

?????? Integrating new materials that have inevitably accumulated since their appearance.

When searching the literature for pertinent articles and reviews, follow these rules:

?????? Be thorough

?????? Use multiple keywords and database sources, and

?????? Look at who has cited previous relevant books and articles.

Rule 3: Take Notes While Reading

Start jotting down interesting information, insights concerning how to organize the review, and thoughts on what to write while reading. This way, you will have a rough draft of the review when you have read the selected literature.

However, note that this draft will need extensive rewriting, restructuring, and rethinking to acquire a text with a coherent argument. Still, it will help you avoid the risk of staring at a black document.

Rule 4: Choose the Type of Review You Wish to Write

Rule 3 gives you a rough idea of the amount of material accessible for the review. This is a good time to decide whether to go for a mini- or a full review. A mini-review is not necessarily a minor review as it can attract more attention from busy readers. However, it will inevitably cause issues, leaving out some relevant material due to space limitations. On the other hand, a full review has more freedom to cover in detail the complexities of a particular scientific development; however, it is left by many readers with limited time for major monographs.

Rule 5: Keep the Review Focused, but Make It of Broad Interest

It is important to keep focused regardless of whether you plan to write a mini- or full review. While the focus is an essential feature of a successful review, you should balance it with the need to make the review relevant to a wider population, which can be circled by discussing the broader implications of the reviewed topic for other disciplines.

Rule 6: Be Critical and Consistent

A good review critically discusses, identifies methodological problems, and identifies research gaps. At the least, you should have a rough idea of:

?????? The major accomplishments in the reviewed field,

?????? The main areas of debate, and

?????? The outstanding research questions.

Involving a set of complementary coauthors to map what has been realized, identify dark clouds on the horizon, and predict potential solutions. On top of being a critical thinker, you should be consistent, for instance, in the choice of passive vs. active voice and present vs. past tense.

Rule 7: Find a Logical Structure

Many features characterize a good review, including whether it’s worth the reader’s time, timely, systematic, well-written, focused, critical, and has a good structure. Reviews use a general introduction of the content and, toward the end, a recapitulation of the main points covered, and take-home messages make sense. Systematic reviews require including information about how the literature was searched.

It is also generally helpful to draw a conceptual scheme of the review, e.g., with mind-mapping techniques to help recognize a logical way to order and link the different sections of a review. A careful selection of diagrams and figures relevant to the reviewed topic can also be valuable to structure the text.

Rule 8: Make Use of Feedback

Reviews of the literature are often peer-reviewed in the same way as research papers. As a rule, incorporating reviewer feedback significantly helps improve a review draft. Reviewers can spot inaccuracies, inconsistencies, and ambiguities that the writers may have yet to notice due to rereading the typescript too often. However, rereading the draft again before submitting it to correct typos, leaps, and muddled sentences is best. This may enable the reviewers to focus on providing advice on the content instead of the form.

Rule 9: Include Your Relevant Research, but Be Objective

??????????? In many cases, reviewers of literature publish studies relevant to the review they are writing, which could create a conflict of interest: how can reviewers report objectively on their work? Some scientists can be overly enthusiastic regarding what they have published; thus, they risk giving too much importance to their findings in the review. However, bias could also occur in another direction. Some scientists may need to be more dismissive of their achievements, so they tend to downplay their contribution (if any) to a field when reviewing it.

Rule 10: Be Up-to-Date, but Do Not Forget Older Studies

??????????? Today, literature reviews need awareness of the overall direction and achievements in the field of inquiry and the latest studies to stay up-to-date before publication.

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