Reading research papers and summarizing it – is a common trend in young researchers who are trying to write a scientific review paper and starting their research career with a passion but they face manuscript rejections by scholarly journals.

The practice of writing a review paper is usually based on the bulk of knowledge researchers derived while doing study and this is the reason that more than 70% of review papers submitted are rejected right after their first submission.

How can we do a good writing practice, is the main purpose of this post.

Review Paper or Summarizing Paper

Summarizing the text while you are studying is for better understanding the science and you can have catalogued it for your better access whenever you are looking for a good reference but it does not mean that you can assemble this text under different headings and then submit it as review paper. A Review is a novel statement or conclusion of a novel concept justified by the published research. You can also say that you have a better conclusion for the results published by other researchers.

Things Not to Do While Reading Literature

• Downloading too many papers at a time for reading
• Copy pasting the text from papers
• Putting too much time on a single paper
• Ignoring the figures and tables of a paper
• Searching the author profiles and their other works

Things to Do While Writing a Review Paper

• Critical thinking all the time
• Avoid making general conclusions
• Summarize results and analyse data instead of summarizing text
• Keep discussing specific conclusions with research fellows
• Keep searching related industrial outputs

Advantages of Writing a Review Paper

Young researchers focus too much on lab work to produce good results so that they can publish their first research paper and ignore writing a (non-research) Review paper which has potential following advantages;

• It enhances your critical thinking and writing skills
• Writing a review paper helps you to understand what is happening around the world in your research discipline
• It improves your data analysis and conclusion making skills
• It helps you to increase your total citations and h-index
• It opens new windows in research career such as editing, writing, analysing etc.

Conclusion

Writing a review paper needs critical reading skills and skills to analyse the published data and making predictions regarding a probability of results. Reading few hundred papers, extracting the text and re-writing to avoid computer based plagiarism will not make you a good researcher or scientist. A good scientist or a good researcher is always thinking critical issues and find possible solutions with minimum harm to nature. Simply it can be concluded that it’s all about brain game to write a good piece of science.