Posts tagged with review.
Writing Russian nesting doll review papers
I'm forcing myself to buckle down and write this entry. I'm coming off a marathon writing binge and the last thing in the world I want to see is another blank .doc file (no, scratch that. The last thing I thing in the world I want to see is Air Bud: Seventh Inning Fetch), but that Freshman Life kid churned out three entries last week (haven't you got a paper to write?) so I ought to catch up.
The reason that the very prospect of generating a few hundred words of text is making me pee a little with fright is that I have spent the better part of the last week working on a review article. It seems like I've been working on it for a year, but the file's datestamp doesn't lie. I am instead caught on the wrong side of relativistic manuscript time dilation, in which time slows down to a greater degree as the blandness and/or complexity of the subject matter at hand increases. Given that I am writing about things including detailed mathematical modelling approaches, time lagged correlation, and the effect of centrosome amplification on tumorigenesis, those of you with a grasp of relativity will have figured out that time, for me, is moving so slowly that you're probably all in 2046 by now. In which case this entry is really, really overdue.
Review articles are unusual as far as academic writing goes, in that they add to your publication record without you having to expend any effort in carrying out actual experimentation. Your publication record is a barometer of your worth as a scientist; it's your RBI, your GAA, your notches on the bedpost. Ergo, something that increases said record without requiring experiments ought to be good, no? Like Mom always said, "If it seems too good to be true..." Because, although review articles require nothing in the way of devoting a year to the meticulous flooding and subsequent observation of pecan weevil habitats, they do necessitate spending several weeks attempting to digest unpalatable papers published by previous weevil-watchers in the hopes that one can identify their scientific essence, repackage said essence in a couple of concise sentences, and then communicate that to future audiences such that they be spared the agony of reading the original wet weevil manuscript. In this respect, writing a review bears more than a passing similarity to the rabbit's digestive process we talked about last week. I eat bad papers and poop out tasty little knowledge pellets. Which you then eat.
This is, of course, assuming you write a review the proper way. Whilst writing this and other reviews, I of course turned to the literature and read other earlier reviews on the subject area, which in turn were based on earlier reviews, that were based on earlier reviews, and on and on in a never-ending recursive cycle of reviewing (which leads me to suspect that when the LHC starts up again and the secrets of the big bang are revealed, scientists will discover that the whole thing was really just a neatly packaged reference to some other earlier big bang). Anyway, in the midst of all the reviewmania, I realized that reviews tend to fall into three categories.
There are the well-written ones that provide timely, comprehensive and concise summaries of a particular topic. These tend to be published in high-impact journals, which you can recognize because their graphics department knows how to use 3D and gradients in all the figures.
There are ones that at least made an attempt at collecting information from a variety of sources but fall flat due to poor writing, being too late to the party, or having very ugly figures without gradients.
And then there are the adverts - reviews written by someone who manages to completely ignore the work of every other scientist in the field, and instead chooses to devote their 4,000 words to their work only, which of course they have already written up in other journals. How these are accepted for publication is beyond me, although it would indicate that some publishers might not be above a bit of the old vanity press. I strongly urge all scientists out there to join me in testing this theory. Next time you encounter a journal that seems willing to publish an advertorial for a single lab's work, please do send them some of your writing along with a small fee and wait to see if it appears in print. Instead of science, however, I suggest a poem, preferably of the teenage angst variety; a list of funny things your cat did; or your favourite meatloaf recipe. It is only through systematic exposition of a flawed publication system that we can return scientific publishing to its past glory and restore balance to the never-ending cycle of reviews! And wet weevil papers.
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JENNIFER GARDY 
