How to write a literature review? The first step of genius begins with diapers, while the first step of scientific research comes from writing reviews.
Imagine the first time you entered the research group, your mentor mysteriously assigned you the following novice task: Tell me in what position can I take a shit to make a splash?
Tell me why it takes the same amount of time to pee when adults and children have different bladder capacities?
Tell me why bees have as much hair as squirrels?
Tell me, does a drunk bird have a big tongue?
How to find the answers to these questions quickly and systematically is the first scientific dilemma you face.
At this time, a roadside beggar looked at you and said: “Young man, I am surprised to see your skeleton, I have a Tathagata Palm …” No, I have several Rewiews here that can help you quickly understand these issues. Are
you looking or not?
Yes, the summary is the martial arts secret book for scientific research! A review article, as its name implies, is a critical evaluation of the entire body of representative work previously published on a particular topic.
Generally speaking, to be accepted for publication in an academic journal, an academic paper must meet the following four criteria: the content of the paper must be consistent with the scope of the journal; the quality of the paper, such as research methods, feasibility, and writing ability, must be high enough; the paper must present a completely novel & # x2F; innovative results; Paper results must be important enough & # x2F; good enough.
However, the third requirement is an exception for an important form of academic paper, the review article.
Reviews tend to be popular with readers, because most readers do not have the time to delve into the entire literature on a particular topic, and reviews provide a great deal of useful information in a relatively small space, allowing readers to invest less time with great returns.
However, I need to correct a wrong concept that a review article is different from a literature review in a graduation thesis or an opening report. There are obvious differences in
their forms: review articles are a fixed type of articles, which often evaluate a large number of works, and there is no limit on the number of years of publication, and a review generally has more than 100 references.
In our opening report or graduation thesis writing, we usually involve the so-called “literature review”, which is more appropriately called “research status at home and abroad”.
“Research status at home and abroad” can be called a “small review”, which is written in exactly the same way as a review article. You can also simply think of it as a shorter review article.
Their main differences are: (1) Compared with the review articles, the length of the research status at home and abroad is smaller, and the reference academic literature is relatively small, generally 10-40 articles are appropriate; (2) The research status at home and abroad is generally aimed at the academic progress in the past 2-5 years, while the review articles are aimed at all historical works published under a specific topic.
So as long as you figure out how to write a review article, you can easily get the “literature review” in your graduation thesis.
In this issue, we will talk about the related issues of summary writing.
What is a review article? A
review article is a form of academic paper that focuses on a specific academic research direction and summarizes, introduces and critically evaluates all or part of the representative academic articles and works published before the direction.
A review article is not a list of papers on a particular academic research direction, and a review article is not a simple stack of academic achievements, so it is bound to be tested by the repetition rate & # x2F;.
Every review article should have a main line, a story, a theme, or a point of view.
Review articles should be driven by ideas, not by words, by the time of publication, or even by the author’s subjective ideas.
The following are the construction ideas of some common review articles: (1) Contradictory review: This kind of review revolves around two or more opposing camps of an academic main line, explaining and elaborating a variety of different and competing theories produced by an academic phenomenon, which are contradictory to each other. But there is enough scientific evidence to support it in academia.
For example, the review written from the perspective of the dispute between sweet tofu jelly and salty tofu jelly is a paradoxical review.
The year 2011 is known as “the first year of Beancurd Jelly” by later generations, because there was a controversy over the taste of sweet & # x2F; salty jellied tofu on Weibo that year. Ma Po-yung, the leader of
the “Salty Party,” believes that “the matter of salted bean curd jelly is a big one, and today is the day to die for justice.” He calls the “Sweet Party” “heretical.”.
Today, the’Sweet Party ‘has suddenly come to an end, covering a situation that has not changed in three thousand years. If all the dukes die in the country, would they rather not be salty than reform?
And the “sweet party” believes that “I am a’sweet party ‘, a descendant of the Yellow Emperor, who keeps pace with the times, gets the flow of heaven, cooks harmoniously, and moistens the bean curd in the invisible.”.
When writing such reviews, they should be unbiased and well-founded.
Of course, this kind of summary is also appropriate for “the debate between fish slices boiled in hot sauce and Boiled Fish with Pickled Cabbage and Chili,” and “the debate between leek dumplings and pork dumplings.”.
Pictures from the Internet (2) Prospect review or retrospective review: There is no obvious difference between prospect review and retrospective review. In a review, review and prospect often appear in pairs.
This kind of review not only introduces the historical nodes of major scientific discoveries or academic concepts under a certain academic main line, but also introduces the new tools, new technologies, new methods or new theories born today, and makes reasonable and scientific expectations for the future.
Like how did humans wipe their asses before toilet paper?
The industrious Chinese people, before the invention of paper, wiped their asses casually.
In the earliest days, all the hands were toilet paper, and all things could be wiped with sand, stone, wooden sticks and earth. With the appearance of the “Toilet Chou” (also a kind of wooden stick) in the
Tang Dynasty, the Chinese people finally had a decent thing to do to solve the most important problems.
In the yuan Dynasty, they may have been fed up with the texture of wood, which made the use of toilet paper popular.
Around this line, until modern times, the review of toilet paper use should be a retrospective or prospective review.
(3) Comparative review: This review aims to compare different measurement & # x2F; design & # x2F; manufacturing & # x2F; modeling methods produced under the same academic line, and comment on their advantages and disadvantages.
This contrast can also be interdisciplinary, such as comparing the contributions of different disciplines under the same academic line.
When the Chinese people are worried about wiping their asses, foreign friends have the same confusion.
Compared with the toilet of the Chinese people, the ancient Roman emperor invented the stick “tersorium” used to wipe the buttocks, the ancient Greek “dung stone” and the Viking fur fabric used to wipe the buttocks, all of which are different design methods around an academic theme (how to wipe the buttocks). The review based on this writing idea should be a comparative review.
Reviews are constructed in various forms, but their purpose is only one, that is, to make the academic achievements scattered in the past, present and even future full of order, rather than chaos.
It is precisely because a review gives order to these achievements that readers can grasp a large amount of scientific information after a simple reading. The structure of the
review article Once the idea of the construction of the review article has been determined, the rest of the work should start with a comprehensive literature reading.
If the title of our literature review is “Is the cat solid or liquid?”?
Obviously, this is a paradoxical overview. There are three theories on
this topic: (1) a cat is a solid: it has a relatively fixed volume and shape; (2) a cat is a liquid: it can adjust its shape with the container; (3) a cat is both a solid and a liquid: it refers to the “dipola number” in rheology. Although
these theories are contradictory to each other, there is enough scientific evidence to support them in academia.
In order to write this review, references are important.
Pictures originate from the Internet. In a sense, no matter what type of review, the references cited are the focus, because these references really tell the reader what the review is introducing. This is the difficulty of writing a
review.
A person can only organize and synthesize the work he is familiar with, which means that the author of the review needs to have sufficient academic experience, so the industry is often the field of the author will be invited to write the review. Those who
make up the number will easily expose their academic deficiencies in the lack of & # x2F; missing references, resulting in a review making a fool of itself by taking a part for the whole. The introduction to
a review article often begins with a description of the background topic and why it is important.
Then, in the theme writing, it summarizes the academic controversy, progress or historical development under the current review theme. The importance of the
introduction is that it clearly defines the scope of the review so that the reader knows what he needs and what he does not need to consider. The structure of the middle section of the
review article is designed according to the story being told, so it depends largely on the topic chosen by the author.
A good writer will guide the writing process of the review by writing stories, which requires the author to keep in mind the organizational structure and academic purpose of the review article at all times. Presenting the results in chronological order is appropriate
only when the topics reviewed in the review are developed in a historical context, and other types of reviews should consider other ways of presentation. The conclusion part of the
review paper should give readers more enlightenment and thinking space while pursuing the generalization of the conclusion.
After a very brief summary of the review and its main messages, it is important to highlight the implications of the review and to point out the gaps and deficiencies in our current knowledge.
In general, the reader would expect the review to paint a picture of the future or a vision of the future.
So in the summary, it is appropriate to end with some speculation about the future.
Okay, what’s the overview like? There is only one definition of a
good summary: that is the role of enlightenment.
Good review articles always strive for accuracy and clarity.
A good review should also be critical and fair, not one that mindlessly accepts all previously published conclusions. When writing a
review, you can criticize academic achievements, but you can’t criticize individuals.
Because the development of science is slow, uneven and intermittent. There will always be many strange wrong turns on the final road
to science, and we should understand them.
To summarize, if you want to write a review paper, the first step is to identify the topic or story of the paper, which helps define the audience for the review.
Then it needs to be driven by the topic and start a large literature search around the topic.
After that, what the author of a review paper should do is to organize and integrate the knowledge in the literature, and put forward his own unique or even novel, critical but not totally accepted, logical rather than simple literature accumulation, which is what the author really gives the review value. References
: [1] M. Pautasso, “Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review”, PLoS ComputBiol. 9 (7), E1003149 (2013). [2] D. J. Bem, 「WritingaReviewArticleforPsychologicalBulletin」,PsychologicalBulletin118(2),172–177.(1995).【3】J.WebsterandR.T.Watson, 「AnalyzingthePasttoPreparefortheFuture:WritingaLiteratureReview,」MISQuarterly26(2),xiii(2002).【4】ChrisA.Mack, Howto writeagood scientifi cpaper. Attention, don’t get lost ~
