Resource of the Week #119: A Resource on Writing Review Articles

Hello again. Recently, when preparing a lecture on writing review articles, I found an article titled “Tips for Writing Your First Scientific Literature Review Article”. I am pleased to feature this article as our Resource of the Week.

In this article, an advanced graduate student discusses her experience writing a review article for a journal. She then provides 10 tips for doing so.

Some of the tips that I especially like are the following:

• As well as searching the literature, ask colleagues which papers they consider most important. Doing so can help in deciding which papers to emphasize.
• Spend some time writing without Internet and without access to the papers that you might cite. Doing so can help you focus on the major concepts and their relationships, without being distracted by details.
• Have different people provide feedback on different parts of the draft. Doing so can help make use of different people’s expertise. And it can avoid giving any one person too much work.

The article appeared in ASBMB Today, the magazine of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. There is now a link to it in the AuthorAID Resource Library.

Until the next post—

Barbara