Editor’s Note: Pharmaceutical Development and Technology seeks to publish review articles because of their value to scientists, potential authors, and journal editors, as introduced below. However, our experience over the years has been that so many submitted review articles are rejected because of failure to meet the primary objectives of a good review article. Well, what defines a good to excellent review article? Our review article editor, Dr Robin Bogner, along with editorial board members, Dr Peter Kleinebudde and Dr Steven Nail, address this question with the following editorial. While authors can use this article to strive toward excellence, Pharmaceutical Development and Technology continues to encourage the submission of good review articles on relevant topics. I thank Dr Bogner for her initiative and to Drs Bogner, Kleinebudde, and Nail for their well-written guidance on what defines an excellent review article.
Michael J. Akers
Editor
Reviews serve several purposes for the readers, authors, and journal editors. When a scientist working in a focused area encounters a new problem that requires additional expertise, s/he often looks to a recent review article to gain some perspective before delving into the detailed literature on the subject. Review articles should enable a scientist unfamiliar with a given topic to become broadly knowledgeable with what is known, and what isn’t known, about that topic. An excellent review in that regard is that of Hancock and Zografi.[Citation1] Authors of research manuscripts cite reviews in the introduction of their work to concisely summarize previous work in the area. A reader who is new to the area can then refer to the review to help understand the intricacies that the author provides in the research paper. A review article may be used to establish the expertise of its author(s).[Citation2] Reviews are also staples in graduate courses where they provide information that is often more timely than can be found in books. And, frankly, journal editors have become more interested in review articles to increase the impact factor1 or number of citations. Since reviews are commonly cited in introductions of original research papers, they increase the number of citations to the journal, improving its reputation.
Authors generally have one of three main motivations to write a review article. Editors provide motivation by inviting experts in the field to review ‘hot topics’. Alternatively, industrial scientists who are tasked with evaluating new technologies, methodologies or product areas have often completed a comprehensive search of the literature, which can serve as the basis for a thorough review article. More often, graduate students, who are preparing to embark on their dissertation research or writing a background chapter for their dissertation, submit their background chapter for publication as a review article. When the author is not an expert in the field, it is wise to ask for help from someone more senior who can provide the perspective necessary to define the scope of the review, its potential relevance to the journal, interpretation of the data, and style.[Citation3] When the expert is consulted early and often, s/he may contribute sufficiently to become a co-author on the paper. Without the advice and perspective of an expert in the field, the manuscript often becomes simply an “annoted bibliography”[Citation4] with little to no interpretation or new ideas gleaned from careful analysis of the collected works. However, the junior author is well advised to avoid simply requesting a single revision from a senior author in exchange for co-authorship. Ideally, the senior author provides perspective in the planning, focusing, and writing of the review. In a rather frank statement, Robin Williamson wrote “I do not suppose that I am the only editor to have struggled through an article and wondered if the senior author had ever taken the trouble to read it before putting his/her name to such a palpably inadequate work.”[Citation2]
While an “annotated bibliography” is usually not suitable for publication as a review, the common characteristics of a “great” review article are more difficult to define. “Review articles have the potential to provide contributions akin to valuable works of art. Although there is no formula for great art, there are characteristics of quality work that transcend styles, mediums, and time periods.”[Citation5] Firstly, great reviews are thorough. This is not meant to imply that all literature in the field should be included or receive the same attention in the text. In analyzing the literature, the review author can adjust the influence of a certain article or set of results according to its sample size or the detail of the methods. For example, conclusions based on smaller sample sizes (i.e. a phenomenon observed in one or two compounds) or results from a study where the methods or conditions are not completely described (e.g. temperature or humidity) should be used carefully by the reviewer. Alternatively, some literature may be intentionally overlooked because it contains flaws or limitations that the author of the review does not wish to propagate in the literature. An alternative to excluding a paper is to point out the limitations; however, increasingly authors are reluctant to criticize the published work of others, fearing either reprisal or the appearance of hostility. The careful review author often uses delicate language to point out limitations in previously published work. Jeremy Short points out the responsibility of the review author in stating “Only when problematic issues are brought to the forefront can scholars tackle such dilemmas head-on.”[Citation5] Thus, while it is difficult to point out the limitations of others’ work, good review authors do so with respect for both the field and previous authors. In his discerning review, Waterman[Citation6] carefully concluded from the results of 70 studies that “the promise of gastric retentive drug delivery systems remains unfulfilled at this time.”
The focus of the subject area of a “great” review is carefully chosen. Increasingly, depth of the review is valued over breadth. Once all of the potential literature has been assembled, the next step is to pare it down to a subset that the author can thoroughly analyze and compare, such that new ideas can be synthesized. Of course, this often leads the author back into the literature to seek out the articles that provide a deeper understanding of the assembled literature. Data, results, and conclusions from other fields can be compared to those in the pharmaceutical sciences to enrich our understanding of an interesting phenomenon. Finding literature in other fields is difficult, since terminology and databases can be quite different. Colleagues in seemingly unrelated disciplines can point the potential review authors to exciting finds in other fields. The paring of the assembled literature is an iterative process, wherein the author selects a subject area of interest and then narrows the focus several times. Ultimately the persistent author may find the focus of the review to be far narrower than s/he expected. The usefulness of a narrowly focused subject area is that one can provide a deeper analysis and see clear trends in an otherwise overwhelming set of data. By focusing, then, it is easier to identify new themes, ideas, and trends. The importance of bringing something new to the field in one’s review cannot be overstated. The review of Iveson et al.[Citation7] structures the existing knowledge in a new way by presenting a modern approach to describe granulation phenomena. Furthermore, open questions are addressed in order to guide future research. The authors were able to shape the field of wet granulation.
Seasoned investigators often know the literature well enough to know what new points they wish to stress even before they formally assemble the articles in preparation for writing. However, more junior authors may wish to organize the relevant data from many papers into tables so that patterns in the data more easily emerge. Tables are useful to the author during the manuscript preparation phase for comparing and contrasting data such as methods, sample preparation, model compounds, and measured values. The very same tables can be included in the manuscript to aid the reader in finding the underlying literature. The synthesis of new ideas from patterns in the literature is an essential component of an exemplary review. While the author does not present new data, the existing literature can be presented in ways to: (a) Generate new ways of thinking about the assembly of data, (b) identify gaps in the data, (c) analyze conflicting data, and (d) demonstrate trends in the larger data set across many papers. The key is for the author to add something new, not simply restate what is known. In the conclusions, review authors can suggest areas of new research that have come to their attention during a comprehensive study of the literature. While this is not often done, several authors and editors have noted their desire to see suggestions for research included in reviews.[Citation3,Citation4,Citation8]
Perhaps this goes without saying, but potential review authors must guard against plagiarism. Though sometimes challenging, the review author simply must resist using the original authors’ words; instead s/he must paraphrase the methods, results, and conclusions. Even when paraphrased, the ideas deserve citation. If it is absolutely necessary to use the original authors’ words, quotation marks are a requirement. In the field of pharmaceutical technology, it is rare to see quotation marks around descriptions of methods and results; it is more appropriate to paraphrase these. However, if the original author uses a particularly crafty phrase to describe a phenomenon or concept, the review author can utilize the phrase in quotes.
In conclusion, the best review articles are also original contributions. They represent more than an assembly of literature for the readers’ consideration. The assembly of the literature is a big job, but the real work comes through in the analysis of the assembled literature. The very best reviews offer new ideas and ways of looking at vast arrays of existing data in one or many fields.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge the assistance of Sharon Giovenale, Librarian at the University of Connecticut, and useful discussions with Professor Lee Kirsch at University of Iowa.
Notes
The current impact factor for a journal is the average number of times articles in a listed journal that were published in the previous two years were cited in the latest calendar year, as documented in the Journal Citation Reports by ISI Web of Knowledge (Thomson-Reuters).
References
- Hancock BC, Zografi G. Characteristics and significance of the amorphous state in pharmaceutical systems. J Pharmaceut Sci 1997;86(1):1–12.
- Williamson RC. How to write a review article. Hosp Med 2001;62(12):780–782.
- Green BN, Johnson CD, Adams A. Writing narrative literature reviews for peer-reviewed journals: Secrets of the trade. J Sports Chiropractic Rehabil 2001;15(1):5–19.
- Squires BP. Biomedical review articles: What editors want from authors and peer reviewers. Can Med Assoc J 1989;141:195–197.
- Short J. The art of writing a review article. J Manage 2009;35(6):1312–1317.
- Waterman K. A critical review of gastric retentive controlled drug delivery. Pharmaceut Develop Technol 2007;12:1–10.
- Iveson S, et al. Nucleation, growth and breakage phenomena in agitated wet granulation processes: A review. Powder Technol 2001;117:3–39.
- Aaron L. Writing a literature review article. Radiologic Technol 2008;80(2):185–186.