Start With a Review Article · Method

Purpose

A review article sums up the research on a question: what’s been studied, what was found, where people disagree, and what’s still unknown. Experts write them so that other people don’t have to read hundreds of papers to get oriented. That makes a review the best first read in a field you don’t know.

There are a few kinds, and the differences matter:

A narrative review is an expert’s summary of a field. Useful for orientation, but the author chooses what to include.
A systematic review follows a method set in advance to find and appraise all the studies on a specific question. Cochrane reviews of health treatments are the best-known example.
A meta-analysis pools the numbers from many studies into one overall estimate, usually as part of a systematic review.
A scholarly encyclopedia entry, such as one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, does the same orienting job for a concept or a debate.

One good review gives you four things at once: the words the field uses, the names that matter, the state of the evidence, and a reference list you can follow.

When you need it

You’re starting on a topic you don’t know, and every paper you open assumes you already do.
Your search returns hundreds of individual studies and you can’t tell which matter.
You’ve seen one striking study and want to know whether it fits the overall pattern or stands alone.
You keep meeting terms, names or debates you don’t recognize.
You want a reference list to start following the trail.

How to do it

1Search for reviews, not studies

Add words like review, systematic review, meta-analysis or overview to your search. In Google Scholar, the left-hand sidebar has a Review articles filter (librarians first reported it in early 2022). Google hasn’t said how it decides what counts as a review, so check that each result really is one. In PubMed, the Article type filter in the sidebar includes Review, Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis; you can also type systematic review[pt] into the search, though that can miss very new records that haven’t been fully indexed yet.

2Go to the places built for overviews

Some publishers exist to produce summaries:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: free entries written and kept current by experts, reviewed by an editorial board before publication. It keeps fixed quarterly archive editions so you can cite a stable version.
Annual Reviews: a nonprofit publisher, founded in 1932, of review journals across the life, biomedical, physical and social sciences.
The Cochrane Library: systematic reviews of health questions, each with a plain-language summary.

Textbooks and academic handbooks do the same job for older, settled material.

3Pick a good one

Check the date first: a review can’t cover anything published after it was written, so look for a recent one or a later update. Check where it appeared, whether the authors work in the field, and who funded it. For questions about whether something works, prefer a systematic review over a narrative one, because its methods for choosing studies are written down and you can check them.

4Read it for the map

Read the introduction and conclusion first, then the section closest to your interest. As you go, write down the terms the field uses, the researchers and studies that keep coming up, what the authors treat as settled, and what they call open or disputed. Don’t try to master the details yet. You’re getting your bearings, and feeling somewhat lost at this stage is normal.

5Use the reference list as a map

The reference list is the review’s most useful part. Mark the studies cited for the claims you care about, the older works everyone builds on, and any other reviews. Those are your next reads. Then look forward too: use “Cited by” to see newer work that cites the review. Chase References Backward and Forward shows how.

6Check the studies that matter

A review is still a secondhand account. When a finding in it becomes important to your work, open the study it cites and check that the study says what the review says it does. Check References as You Read covers this.

Try it

Your task

You want to know whether highlighting is a good way to study. Instead of reading single experiments, find a major review that rates common study techniques. Note who wrote it, where and when it was published, how many techniques it covers, which it rates most useful, where highlighting lands, and two studies from its reference list you would read next.

Show a hint

Try Google Scholar with words like “learning techniques” and “review,” or use the Review articles filter. One well-known review appeared in a journal of the Association for Psychological Science that publishes long reports for a general audience.

Show the answer and the path

The review is John Dunlosky, Katherine Rawson, Elizabeth Marsh, Mitchell Nathan and Daniel Willingham, “Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology,” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 14(1): 4–58, January 2013 (doi.org/10.1177/1529100612453266).

It reviews ten techniques that students commonly use.
High utility: practice testing (quizzing yourself, flashcards) and distributed practice (spreading study out over time).
Moderate utility: elaborative interrogation, self-explanation and interleaved practice.
Low utility: summarization, highlighting and underlining, the keyword mnemonic, imagery for learning from text, and rereading. So highlighting is in the low group, despite being one of the most common habits.
The reference list is long: Crossref counts 395 entries. Two natural next reads are Roediger and Karpicke, “Test-Enhanced Learning,” Psychological Science 17(3), 2006, on practice testing; and Cepeda and colleagues, “Distributed Practice in Verbal Recall Tasks: A Review and Quantitative Synthesis,” Psychological Bulletin 132(3), 2006, itself a review, on spacing.

The review is from 2013, so the last step is to check its “Cited by” list for newer work, which is how you’d find out whether the ratings have held up.

Common mistakes

Treating a review as the last word. It reflects the evidence up to its date and its authors’ choices about what to include.
Mistaking other things for reviews. Editorials, commentaries and opinion pieces summarize a field too, but they argue a position. Check the article type.
Trusting a filter blindly. Search filters label things imperfectly. Look at what each result actually is.
Reading only the abstract. The orienting material is in the body: the tables of studies, the section headings, the reference list.
Citing the review for a study’s finding. If a specific result matters to you, read the study and cite it, or say “cited in” the review.

Limits

Reviews lag behind research, sometimes by years. On a new or narrow topic there may be no review at all; then a recent study’s introduction, which usually summarizes earlier work, or a textbook chapter can stand in.

A narrative review reflects its authors’ judgment about what to include, and two reviews of the same field can reach different conclusions. A systematic review is only as good as the studies it pools, and its conclusions depend on the question it was set up to answer. Some reviews are paywalled: try the author’s own page, a free version listed in Google Scholar, or a library.

Search tools change. The filters described here were checked on the date at the top of this page and may look different when you read it.