How to write a rave review.

The Thomson Reuters (ISI) Web of Knowledge service lists data for nearly 7400 science journals. How many journals do you read on a regular basis? How many topics can you keep up with? If your answer to either question reached double digits, you are well beyond most scientists. The truth is that the number of papers published each year is so large that no one can keep up with the pace of science. If you want to gather even basic knowledge of a subject that is not within your immediate sphere of activity, you must rely on some sort of summary document that can bring you “up to speed” on the current state of a discipline. This is the perfect role for a review article. Scientific review articles are critical analyses of available information about a particular topic. Unlike research articles, review articles do not present new data. Their purpose is to assess and put into perspective what is already known. Unlike research articles written on narrowly defined topics for a specialized audience of peers, review articles often examine broader topics for a more general audience. For example, a review of the extracellular matrix might be published in a journal whose readers are surgeons, rather than research specialists and pathologists with a greater knowledge of the topic, or it might be read by specialists who need to keep up with developments in related subspecialties. Many reviews, however, are written on narrow topics. For example, a review of mass spectrometry principles would be quite general, whereas a review of mass spectrometry in the clinical laboratory would be more specific and a review of the ionization effect in mass spectrometry would be even more specific. There are 3 main types of review articles. The most common, which we discuss in detail in this paper, is the traditional narrative or “scholarly” review, in which the author evaluates and synthesizes what is already known about a topic. The problem with many narrative reviews is that they are vague and even eccentric in the collection, selection, and interpretation of the information they discuss. Often only a selected group of studies is considered (“cherry picking”), and the selection is quite likely biased. Because clinical review articles are often used by clinicians as guides for making decisions, many journals publish a second type, the systematic review. These reviews use explicit and rigorous methods to identify, critically evaluate, and synthesize all relevant studies in order to present a concise summary of the best available evidence regarding a sharply defined clinical question (1–3 ). A review protocol defining the design and methods for a systematic review—including how studies or trials will be identified and the inclusion and exclusion criteria—is written before the review begins. A systematic plan is established to see that all relevant studies or trials (or at least as many as possible) are identified and included in any analyses that are done. A systematic review does not necessarily contain a statistical synthesis of the results from the studies included. The reviewer might find that the designs of the studies identified differ too greatly to permit the studies to be combined, for example, or that the results available for each study cannot be combined because of differences in the way outcomes were assessed. In such cases, the reviewer may simply report—as in a high-quality scholarly review—a wellreasoned but nonstatistical assessment of what might be drawn from the cumulative review. The third type of review article is the metaanalysis, which is a systematic review that uses a specific methodological and statistical technique for combining quantitative data from several independent studies. Established standards already exist for conducting and writing a systematic review or metaanalysis (4, 5 ). Scientific review articles are usually solicited by journal editors when they feel that some aspect of their journal’s discipline has reached a point at which the research and findings in disparate studies need to be critically evaluated by someone competent to do a comprehensive assessment of the work, to separate the wheat from the chaff, to synthesize the ideas and findings the work comprises, and to bring an overall perspective to the field or topic. That person is usually a well-known and well-respected scientist in the field, although not necessarily an “elder statesman.” Depending on the topic, the discipline, and the circumstances, journal editors might invite a review from a promising younger researcher when they expect the younger researcher to be more likely to consider the invitation a valuable career opportunity, to be more 1 Department of Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA; 2 Department of Pathology, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, MI. * Address correspondence to this author at: Department of Surgery, University of California, San Francisco, 1600 Divisidero St., Room C-322, San Francisco, CA 94143-1674. E-mail Pamela.Derish@ucsfmedctr.org. Received December 20, 2010; accepted December 28, 2010. Previously published online at DOI: 10.1373/clinchem.2010.160622 Clinical Chemistry 57:3 388–391 (2011) Clinical Chemistry Guide to Scientific Writing