Craft a Point of View
Review papers are syntheses of information, not summaries. Synthesis requires analysis, and analysis entails a search for specific components. Thus, the first step in writing a review paper is to identify specifically what you want to know about. In a writing universe where time is an infinite resource, you could dwell with your sources until a novel pattern of understanding emerged from the primordial cognitive soup (a process fittingly called “emergent analysis”). However, the reality most of us occupy includes deadlines, making the task of identifying a point of view (POV) rather more urgent.
Since we are focusing on discipline-specific writing, we shall appeal to discipline-specific thinking. Every field of study and practice has endemic points of view; POVs that embody the discipline’s particular approach to carving up the universe. Medicine has at its core biomedical, clinical, patient, and social perspectives that form a map from which specific directions can be drawn.
To use this concept map, start with an area of interest and combine with another node to focus a review question to yield better search results. For example, let’s say you’re interested in ADHD. A PubMed search on that topic yields over 29,000 results, which is a bit much to scroll through. Think instead of “what about ADHD?” — and focus using the endemic approaches on the different nodes.
- Clinical Process
- Symptoms — 18,000+
- Diagnosis — 15,000+
- Treatment — 14,000+
- Prognosis — 2,000+
- Biomedical
- Characteristics — 1,900+
- Epidemiology — 6,000+
- Etiology — 9,000+
- Pathology — 1,400+
- Population
- Ethnicity — 600+
- Age — 7,000+
- Gender — 3,000+
- Social Group (e.g., occupation: in this example, teachers) — 1,000+
- Social Issues
- Economics — 500+
- Demographics — 2,000+
As the search results show, focusing a topical interest by combining with another medical POV can chop the results list by a lot. Nevertheless, there are still too many options because the search question is still too big. Continue combining features to refine the question further. Some examples are listed below.
- What is the typical age of diagnosis for girls/boys with ADHD?
- What are the long term healthcare costs of ADHD treatment?
- How do parents cope with ADHD children?
- How do college students manage ADHD?
- What are the genetic biomarkers of ADHD?
You’ll also find that any particular node on the map can break down even further; for example, “treatment” typically includes the categories: surgical/non-surgical, invasive/non-invasive, pharmaceutical/non-pharmaceutical, aggressive/non-aggressive, standard/alternative, compliance/non-compliance, side effects, and patient criteria. These generate additional possibilities, such as:
- What are non-pharmaceutical treatments for ADHD?
- What are the patient criteria for stimulant medication in ADHD?
- Which side effects of ADHD medication result in patient non-compliance?
As you scan results lists, look for the patterns of words that indicate endemic POVs. Take a moment to read through the outlines below — what themes emerge as likely patterns of analysis?
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Analysis: A few different patterns suggest themselves! First, there is an intervention (treatment) called “neurostimulation” — it is employed invasively (deep brain stimulation) and non-invasively (transcranial). Both types can be applied to different disorders, though in these reviews, neuropathic pain is the target disorder. In addition, neurostimulation is applied to different nerve and anatomical sites. Thus, if you were writing about treatments for chronic pain, neurostimulation would be one intervention to include. Alternatively, if you were exploring the uses of Deep Brain Stimulation, chronic pain would be one use. Or, you could be writing about a nerve site as a therapeutic target. Overall, the POVs gleaned from only the outlines of 2 review articles include therapy, anatomy, invasive surgical techniques, non-invasive surgical techniques, chronic pain, neuropathic pain, primary disorders (which implies secondary disorders), and non-cancerous pain (implying cancer-caused pain). You probably came up with others on your own!