Action Plan and Outlines
What is a review paper?
Briefly, a review paper is a synthesis of published research in a well-defined area, with a measure of assessment included as well. What does this mean?
According to the APA (2001, 7): “Review articles, including meta-analyses, are critical evaluations of material that has already been published. By organizing, integrating, and evaluating previously published material, the author of a review article considers the progress of current research toward clarifying a problem. In a sense, a review article is tutorial in that the author defines and clarifies the problem; summarizes previous investigations in order to inform the reader of the state of current research; identifies relations, contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies in the literature; and suggests the next step or steps in solving the problem.”
Thus, a review paper is a synthesis of published material. Synthesis implies analysis — the writer analyzes published material on a research area according to some criteria or point of view (POV). The criteria form the focus of the review, so if a review examines efficacy of an intervention for some disease state, then the reader knows that the only information covered in the review pertains to “efficacy of intervention Y for disease X” — not diagnosis, not research methodology, not any other disease. The POV is the constraining feature of the review, akin to the research question of a research report.
Skills Inventory
- You will need to know the kinds of publication allowed for the assignment
- Only scholarly literature? Is trade literature allowed? What about clinical guidelines of .gov-type sources?
- Are there restrictions on the genres you can use for the paper? Confirm if all types of articles are allowed (research report, different kinds of reviews, case studies, theory papers, etc)
- You will need to know the types of review paper, and specifically the kind you are writing
- See “A typology of reviews: an analysis of 14 review types and associated methodologies” (free access supplied by publisher) (via PubMed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19490148)
- You will need to know the combination format of a typical review paper: Intro — Topical Subheadings — Conclusion
- If writing a systematic review, see the PRISMA Guidelines
Before You Write
- You will need a completed Annotated Bibliography
Schedule
Scheduling a review paper is less direct than scheduling a research report, but (very) generally speaking, it takes 4-6 weeks to write a 5-7 page (double spaced) review paper, assuming a well-defined topical interest is already in place. “5-7 pages” is the average length required to competently explain one idea in an academic science publication (this is an anecdotally-derived #, but a useful heuristic: a 25 page chapter is written as a series of 5-7 page sections). This time-table assumes the bibliography has not been started, but that the paper has a defined submission date at least 4 weeks out from when the paper is assigned. If an instructor assigns a due date, but doesn’t structure a class to include writing tasks, then the writer will need to start scheduling this project on their own.
Please note: Review papers are the most cognitively challenging kind of paper to write — the process driving the writing is thinking. “Thinking” is much harder than following a given methodology in an experiment, which is why research reports are so much easier to write. You will need time to search, time to analyze, time to synthesize, and then, time to write. I’m making such a big deal out of this because if you’ve written 5-page expository “research” essays and found them fairly easy to write, you may woefully underestimate the cognitive demands of a review paper. Reviews are evidence-based acts of synthesis. Synthesis requires much more brain work than the summarize-and-comment approach characterizing the typical college paper. Brain work takes time. Make sure you schedule it into your writing process.
Week 1 — Establishing the Research Focus
- Figure out topical interest: you need this to begin searching the literature.
- A meaningful, useful topic statement happens in a declarative sentence that includes nouns, verbs, and modifiers.
- For example, “Alzheimer’s Disease” is not a useful topic statement — it’s just too big to be a meaningful starting place (run a PubMed search and see what you get! On 9/13/19, the hit count was just above 108,000). In addition to the big topic, you need qualifiers: what about AD do you want to know? At the minimum, craft a more complete sentence such as “What are the symptoms of AD?” Then run a search: if you’re still getting thousands of hits (it’s still above 46,000 hits), you need to focus more, e.g. “What are the earliest symptoms of AD?” (down to around 700 hits) or “What are reliable pre-clinical symptoms of AD?” (19 hits on PubMed as of 9/13/19).
- Begin collecting literature related to your topic — for the first week, simply gather literature to get an idea of what is out there. Use this week to refine your question.
Weeks 2-3 — Begin the Annotated Bibliography
- Do not write a review without an annotated bibliography. Reviews are acts of synthesis; synthesis begins with analysis. Analysis is the work of identifying which parts of a paper are relevant to a given project. The annotated bibliography — whatever format you choose for this part — is the building material for the paper.
- Create a simple labeling system for your Annotated Bibliography — letter or number each source so you can refer to them easily.
Weeks 3-4 — Begin Mapping Patterns
- The topic statement you wrote to search was a starting point, but it may not be the ending point. As you build your annotated bibliography, begin looking for patterns of agreement, disagreement, or non-agreement (where evidence/informaton is similar, dissimilar, or has no clear relationship, respectively).
- Begin mapping the patterns. Draw mini-outlines, concept maps, bubbles, whatever notation system you use to think through complex problems. If you haven’t had to do this level of work before, I recommend concept maps as a starting point (many people find outlines too confining or constraining in the early-thinking stage of a project).
- At this point, you aren’t making final writing decisions, you’re doing advanced brainstorming — trying out patterns of analysis to see what you find, how well they work, if they lead anywhere or just fizzle out (interesting side note: patterns that fizzle out quickly often turn out to be definitions or short explanations:-)).
- Play with writing sentences or phrases for the relationships — they may turn into key ideas for the body of the paper
- For example, you might have started with “early symptoms of Alzheimer’s”, waded through a few hundred papers, and found different ways of classifying early symptoms, perhaps behavioral, cognitive, sensory, and physiological. Perhaps you decide to focus in on just one of those, such as motor or sensory symptoms.
- The goal of this work is to craft the focus of the paper: the perspective from which you will examine the literature and a roadmap to the body of the paper.
- For example: Sensory dysfunction in early AD, specifically, smell, taste, auditory, and visual.
Weeks 4-5 — Begin outlining or mapping the body sections of the review
- Once the initial mapping work is complete, you should be able to narrow down to the set of relationships you really want to write about. The next step is to focus on just those relationships, and begin mapping or outlining the body of the review. For each area, you’ll need a topical subheading for the paper, then the information that will go into that part of the paper.
- Since reviews are written as a series of related mini-essays on a topic, logically speaking, transitions are not needed. This is the role of subheadings.
- Also, if you wish to talk about the relationship between two items, you have to write about each first.
Weeks 5-6 — Draft paper
- Reviews have functional Introductions and Conclusions
- Reviews have topically-headed body sections.