Writing Case Reports and Review Articles
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Review Articles
A good review article summarizes, synthesizes, and critiques the literature on a topic. Review articles may be descriptive — providing an overview of a topic or field, similar to a chapter in a textbook — or evaluative — analyzing data from many sources to answer a research question — or somewhere in between.
This section covers the basics of writing a review article:
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Defining purpose, audience, and scope
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Collecting the literature
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Writing the introduction section
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Writing the main text
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Citing references
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Writing the abstract
A well-written sample review article is included at the end of the chapter.
Defining Purpose, Audience, and Scope
Before you begin writing a review article, you must define your purpose, audience, and scope. In many cases, review articles are written in response to an invitation from a journal’s editor. In those cases, the invitation usually defines the purpose, audience, and scope — but if it does not, you should call or e-mail the editor to clarify them. If you are writing an unsolicited review article, call or e-mail the editor of the journal you want to submit it to and ask whether such an article would be welcome. If the journal has requested a review on the same topic from another author recently, the editor probably won’t be interested in your article (and you can save time by immediately preparing to submit it to another journal). If the journal is interested, the editor can help you focus the article to better meet the journal’s needs.
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