Before you get much further, I have an admission to make. We can’t really tell you how to write the body of a review paper. Why? Because the body of a review paper is always an individualistic creation; you are the only one who knows what point of view you’ve carved out of the mountain of literature you’ve read. You are the only one who’s privy to the path your perspective will make the reader follow. If you haven’t read “Establish a POV”, then do that now. You’ll need that information before proceeding.
So, what can we say about writing the body of a review paper? First, we can examine how the body of reviews are constructed by looking at examples from different fields. We can then examine the structures underlying these choices. Second, we will take another look at synthesis. Finally, we can look at citation patterns in relationship to how information is discussed; in particular, we need to look at topic-oriented and author-oriented paragraph structure.
Method, not Madness: Structuring with Subtopics
Caveat! Before getting started on this exercise, I feel morally compelled to state that we do not EVER recommend using only the abstract as a source. Abstracts are filtering tools: use them to make decisions about whether and which parts of an article you need, but do not rely on the abstract to faithfully represent all the information to be found in the actual publication. Nonetheless, abstracts can be useful teaching tools, and that is their raison d’être here.
Let’s start with an example. Below are images linked to pdfs (for easier reading).
Example || Agroecological practices for sustainable agriculture. A review
To begin, read the abstract. Then read through the outline. Please do so before reading on. When finished, you should notice some striking similarities between each.
Now, mark where the abstract provides the motivation for the review. Next, indicate the main topic around which the review rotates. Underline the “overview” material, marking both the roadmap and perspective (focus) statements, then mark the criteria guiding evaluation. Finally, map the analysis by linking key words in the abstract to its match in the outline. All of these tasks can be completed using only the first 6 sentences.
The POV of the review is indicated by the 3 key words identified in the overview synopsis; these are repeated again in the body of the abstract where the authors have identified the major ideas covered in the review — efficiency, substitution, and redesign, analyzed with respect to “advantages and drawbacks with emphasis on diversification”. Evaluation will be based on the potential for agroecological practices use in the future. All of this information is motivated by a problem statement laid out in sentences 1 and 2: there’s going to be a lot of people to feed soon, and we’d better start an inventory of what is going to work.
(.Just doing this much analysis reveals how much the abstract leaves out. The outline also clues the reader into required vocabulary, so if you don’t know what “crop succession” is, a side trip to Wikipedia is in order before jumping into the article.)
So, what’s the point? Reviews are full of information, but that information is carefully curated, pruned to shape a specific message around a particular topic. In other words, as we’ve been saying, reviews communicate an author’s point of view on a subject. Not an opinion, but a POV motivated by the writer’s experience with an area of research. The area of research can be anything! Even a financial accounting of the banking industry (…who knew?). Before you begin putting together sentences, map the content of the review. At the center of the map, write a phrase capturing the topic. Draw spokes to each major section, mirroring the roadmap statement. Write the focus / perspective in the upper corner, then pencil-in short statements or lists for each major section with the analysis according to the perspective statement. Your “map” should look something like the outline above. You’ve completed stage one of the body, and it’s time to move from analysis to synthesis.
Use Synthesis to Build Silos
The review writer is obligated to do the hard work of pruning — it is not the reader’s job to figure out what you want to say. Once you’ve mapped the content of the review, it’s time to fill in details. For each sub-topic, write the key ideas to be conveyed, aiming for one key idea per paragraph. (Usually, the key idea will come early in the paragraph, often the first and second sentence.) Ruthlessly cut out information not directly pertinent to your POV.
Now that you’ve got a pile of details, it’s time to combine. The process of combining parts into a new whole is called synthesis. In reviews, synthesis happens at both the level of sentences and the level of text.
Sentence-level Synthesis
In scholarly prose, ALL information is assumed to have provenance, to have originated from somewhere. In-text citations (hereafter “citations”) signal the source of an idea. Citations are easiest to manage as a writer when you simply accept that every sentence must signal provenance, and mark accordingly. Logically, this results in 2 possibilities. Either a sentence (or part of a sentence) is overtly marked with a citation or it is not overtly marked with a citation. The conditions governing this decision are as follows.
- Marked
- first mention (first use of source)
- subsequent mention, but new topic (source used again, but to introduce new piece of information)
- only mention of source
- Unmarked
- common knowledge (historical facts/events, basic terms in a discipline)
- unambiguous continuation of a previous source
- original contribution of the writer
Writing Tip: In the beginning of your writing career, you are better off over-marking citations than under-marking. The former signals that you understand your beginner status in the field; the latter can get you accused of plagiarism.
Let’s examine sentence level synthesis and citation use with an example. In the article linked below, the overview portion of the introduction (which is the final paragraph of the Intro, just as it should be!), begins with the following sentence: “This article begins with a background section that explains the concept of FCA and related issues.” FCA means Full Cost Accounting, “… a practical tool to deal with the complexity of triple bottom line decisions in the automotive environment. It embraces both internal and external sustainability impacts and translates them into the widely known and accepted business language of ‘money’ (Bebbington et al., 2007).” The review’s goal is to provide a comprehensive examination of FCA methods available to the auto industry and to recommend the best accounting strategy among FCA options.
2.1. The concept of FCA
FCA, like life-cycle costing, cost-benefit analysis, balanced scorecard for sustainability and material flow cost accounting, is classified under the umbrella of Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) tools and systems (Jasch and Savage, 2009 and Qian and Burritt, 2009). The purpose of EMA is to assist the internal planning and decision-making process within an organisation by measuring environmental information and making it more visible for decision-makers (Schaltegger and Burritt, 2000). EMA identifies, collects and analyses both physical information (e.g. use and flows of materials, energy, water and waste) and monetary information on environment-related earnings, costs and savings (Burritt et al., 2002 and Jasch and Savage, 2009). The majority of EMA tools place particular emphasis on measuring direct environmental costs such as the use of energy, materials and water, and waste generation as they are directly related to a number of environmental impacts caused by organisational operations (Jasch, 2003). What distinguishes FCA from other EMA tools is that it has been developed to measure both an entity’s direct costs and indirect costs (Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA), 1997). It also captures external costs, which are defined as the damages or negative effects of an entity’s activities and decisions borne elsewhere in the system by parties not responsible for causing these effects in the first place (Bebbington et al., 2001 and Russell, 2011). The most obvious external costs are the various forms of air, water and soil pollution such as greenhouse gases (GHG), sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and toxic substances.
The following terms are used as synonyms of FCA in the literature but they embody the same concept: full environmental cost accounting (Epstein, 1996), total cost accounting and total cost assessment (Centre for Waste Reduction Technologies (CWRT), 1999). The term FCA is also used interchangeably with full cost pricing but it is important not to confuse the nature and purpose of these two tools. FCA provides useful input information for the decisions on pricing an entity’s products and services by identifying, measuring and monetising the costs that may be considered when moving towards the full cost pricing structure. These costs can then be incorporated into the prices of goods and services through full cost pricing (CICA, 1997).
First, a table of all the sources used, in the order they are used in the text.
Analysis: Writers often complain that they are citing every sentence in a review. The answer to the complaint is “yes, of course!”. By definition, a review is a synthesis of the published literature, meaning that the principal contribution of the writer is in the POV, selection of sources, and evaluation/recommendation. The bulk of the writing will be cited because it comes from someplace else. This is clearly demonstrated in these two paragraphs wherein 8 of 11 sentences include citations, and of the 12 citations, 11 point to different sources. This last point is critical! Clearly, there is no summary included in this excerpt. NONE. NO SUMMARY. AT ALL. Rather, the writers have taken just the major ideas needed, and employed citations to point to places where these ideas are discussed in greater detail. Think of citations as navigational beacons referring readers elsewhere should they wish to explore further.
Three sentences do not include overt citation: the final sentence of paragraph 1 and middle 2 sentences of paragraph 2. In the first case, the sentence is most likely discipline-specific general knowledge (sources of pollution) while in the second case, the writers are contributing their own interpretation. In these cases, the origin of the information is still included, and the lack of overt citation signals that one of the 3 conditions for unmarked information must be true. It is up to the reader to infer from context which of the 3 conditions best matches the case.
Writing Tip: Take a look at the first sentence of the final paragraph again. Note that two citations are provided. The first occurs in the middle of the sentence, referring to the immediately preceding unit of information (“full environmental cost accounting”). The lesson here is to put citations where they make most sense for the reader.
Steer Synthesis using Topics; Specify using Authors
In the same way that “global warming” refers unambiguously to the warming of the planet, linguists and literary analysts refer to what a text is about as the “topic” of discourse. While not a scintillating term, it’s intuitively easy to understand. Considerable research points to the cognitive reality of topichood; it turns out that much language structure is dedicated one way or another to helping humans negotiate topics in the service of mutual comprehension.
Thus, when every English teacher from the 4th grade on insisted that paragraphs be about just one thing, they were proffering solid advice based on reader cognition. Reading is hard work: unlike speaking, we are not hard-wired to read and write, but must learn these skills by associating a fairly arbitrary set of squiggles to speech sounds, then to combining squiggles into larger units, finally building a repertoire that permits words to persist across time and space between complete strangers.
Readers of academic discourse expect paragraphs to be about one thing — review writing flows when this principle guides composition. Each subsection is about one thing; each paragraph provides a single pillar of support. Syntactically speaking, the topic itself — the idea you’re writing about — builds the scaffold for the paragraph. Topic-oriented discourse can usually be achieved by getting rid of all the announcement phrases, e.g. “a study showed that…”. Just cross out that phrase, and begin with whatever follows the “that”.
In the example below, the writers introduce, then exemplify, the idea that a mathematical function is needed for decision-making. The material in blue introduces the topic; the information in orange exemplifies. The paragraph returns to the topic at the end by explicitly laying out the connection between the topic and its example (a prettily structured paragraph, indeed). Note that while every sentence is cited, not a single one includes mention of a human.
3.2. Applying FCA in the automotive business
Design engineers and managers in the automotive business need to formulate some kind of mathematical function to assess all conflicting objectives before making decisions (Mayyas et al., 2013). It becomes extremely difficult when conflicting factors are measured and presented in different units. For example, a widely accepted tool to assess the environmental performance of a vehicle from the cradle to the grave is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) (Khan et al., 2004). LCA techniques provide physical information about the internal and external environmental impacts of automobiles such as tonnes of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, cubic metres of water or megawatts of energy (Guinee et al., 2002). When compared against each other, it becomes difficult to decide which performance indicators are more or less relevant (Bickel and Friedrich, 2004). For example, an annual emission from an average passenger car is approximately 10.5 kg of VOCs, 112 kg of carbon monoxide, 8.3 kg of nitrogen oxides and 4416 kg of carbon dioxide (USEPA, 2008). Although the emission of carbon dioxide appears to be the most significant if considering the volume, the direct comparison of all these impacts is complex because 1 kg of carbon dioxide causes different social and environmental impact severity than 1 kg of nitrogen oxides (Friedrich and Bickel, 2001).
Reviews carve out territory be mapping ideas.
Do humans ever get center stage? Yes, but under specific conditions. Since reviews are syntheses of information (sick of hearing this yet:-)?), the review is “about” some topic and a related set of sub-topics. The explicit mention of a human actor startles the reader into remembering there are real people behind all these ideas. When an idea associates strongly with a particular researcher or publication because the idea is singular, specific to a person, controversial, or very new, then the name/s of the researcher/s are used overtly in the sentence.
The cost of control approach provides monetised values for the cost of installing and operating pollution control mechanisms that will control (reduce, eliminate, avoid) the pollution to a prescribed level (CICA, 1997). According to Howes (2002), this approach is less controversial than the damage function and provides more reliable estimates because it uses ‘real’ market prices for existing technological solutions to avoid, restore or control pollution.