Review papers are an excellent choice when you want students to have an experience in advanced literacy, but don’t need (or can’t arrange for) students to perform original research. They are very good for most STEM fields, especially the applied fields such as medicine. Most students pursuing undergraduate degrees in medical-related fields aren’t intending on becoming researchers; most will become practitioners. And practitioners read more review or review-like papers (such as clinical guidelines and CMEs) than they do original research. Reviews also work well for teaching so-called “academic prose” to design fields, business students, etc.
A review paper teaches students about original research without performing that task itself. Because they encounter literature with many different types of method design, they gain some skill in analysis. Reviews are also excellent for teaching the points of view endemic to a given discipline. Unlike a research report, which is an exercise in generating data within a given field, reviews provide a more top-down perspective.
The disadvantage to a review paper is that it is harder to write than a research report. A lot harder. The research report is so highly conventionalized that it is relatively simple for students to write good reports, and I’ve had students report back to me their writing had been deemed “elegant” simply for having followed the standard IMRD template. Reviews, on the other hand, look suspiciously like the “research papers” or “lit reviews” that students were taught to write which mostly amounted to a serialized summation, an annotated bibliography in paragraphs. In fact, reviews are evaluative syntheses crafted to reflect a point of view. Stand-alone reviews are usually written by experienced researchers with the maturity required to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate disciplinary knowledge. Many journals publish by invitation only.
Still, review-type writing is an excellent strategy for teaching disciplinary thinking and communication.
We recommend three major steps take place before students are set free to write a review. This process was figured out over many (often painful) years of grading semi-plagiarized or non-synthesized papers. I truly believe that if you follow a plan very much like what we lay out, you’ll have a better time grading papers than if you do not. We put this together after years of getting papers that simply weren’t that well-constructed despite considerable class time and the usual writing process activities. Given that, we only have anecdotal evidence for this claim, so consider this a “best practices” statement, not an evidence-based one. The time it takes to put all of this together is considerable, so again, decide if you want this level of discipline-specific writing in your class, and if not, go for highly structured short papers instead.
Page 2 — Step One: Teach the literature in your field
Page 3 — Step Two: Start with a short, controlled paper
Page 4 — Step Three: Teach students how to craft a point of view
Page 5 — Scheduling and Scaffolding