Ideas and insights also come from discussions with coauthors and colleagues, as well as feedback from reviewers and editors. In this contribution, I share ten simple rules I learned working on about 25 literature reviews as a PhD and postdoctoral student. Reviewing the literature requires the ability to juggle multiple tasks, from finding and evaluating relevant material to synthesising information from various sources, from critical thinking to paraphrasing, evaluating, and citation skills.
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However, it is likely that most scientists have not thought in detail about how to approach and carry out a literature review.
Some graduate schools are now offering courses in reviewing the literature, given that most research students start their project by producing an overview of what has already been done on their research issue. That is why researchers who have spent their career working on a certain research issue are in a perfect position to review that literature. When starting from scratch, reviewing the literature can require a titanic amount of work. For such summaries to be useful, however, they need to be compiled in a professional way. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primary research, timely literature reviews can lead to new synthetic insights and are often widely read. Thus, it is both advantageous and necessary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature.
Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests.
For example, compared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scientific publications. Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields.
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