Writing in the Disciplines Knowledge Base

Map the Content

Review papers are organized according to topical subheadings that reveal the writer’s perspective (POV) on the content. Review papers also sport large bibliographies, implying much analytical work on the part of the writer. Your task after crafting a POV will be to read articles and identify the information needed solely for the review. Remember, reviews are syntheses, not summaries. As the writer, you must both remain faithful to the overall message of a research study while being selective about the parts of the article to be used.

Generally speaking, reviews are NOT written as cumulative texts. Even when pedagogical in nature, the relationship among subtopics is not inter-dependent; that is, subtopic A does not necessarily lead to subtopic B, nor should subtopic B continually allude to subtopic A. Instead, reviews are better understood as “concept maps” or “webs”. Some central assertion (your POV) sits at the hub — the rest of the review is related to that assertion, and so by association to each other, but each part is more or less independent. (In fact, readers should only need to read the introduction + conclusion and whichever internal sections they’re interested in.) This should come as a relief to writers — reviews do not require lengthy transitions between sections; that is what subheadings are for. Furthermore, the overview statement in the introduction tells the reader what is coming up, so has already taken care of the need for transitions.

This independence of subtopics has one logical consequence: if you want to write about the interaction of subtopic A and subtopic B, then the interaction is its own subtopic (we’ll call it “C”). When you think about it, this makes good scientific sense — if I need my reader to understand an interaction among parts, then it is reasonable to first explain each part. For writing, this is a beautiful thing — each part of a process must be identified before the process itself can be discussed.

Here is the overview sentence for the article linked above. Note the writers announce the content sections in the order they appear in the article. This is parallelism at the level of text, demonstrating the care and courtesy of the writer for the comprehension of their reader.

This image shows one subsection of the paper: note the in-text citations. Each source is used to support a particular claim (and in some cases, more than one source). This is called “synthesizing sources” — it is the heart and soul of scientific writing.

Steps to Mapping Content

1. Establish POV
   1. What area of the topic are you focusing on?
   2. What specific question will you answer?
   3. What particular perspective are you taking? (e.g., treatment efficacy, diagnostic tools, population impacts, side effects, etc?)
2. What content sections best convey the answers to #1?
   1. Start with 3-5 major content subheadings
      1. Do any of these content sections need additional divisions?
3. Associate literature with each content section.
   1. Number sources for easy reference.
   2. Use annotated bibliography to specify the message you are using from each source.
4. Decide on order of content sections.
   1. Broad ideas come before narrow, e.g. “diagnosis” precedes “false negative diagnostic results”.
   2. Medical sequence matters: “treatment” logically falls before “prognosis”.
   3. Parts that “act” together precede the review of interaction of those parts.
   4. All else being equal, it doesn’t usually matter what order content sections are written in.

Remember, Reviews are more like mobiles than tapestries.

Craft POV

Go to Rev Intros