{"id":1314,"date":"2012-10-04T10:35:09","date_gmt":"2012-10-04T10:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/?p=1314"},"modified":"2012-10-04T10:35:09","modified_gmt":"2012-10-04T10:35:09","slug":"in-defence-of-reviews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2012\/10\/04\/in-defence-of-reviews\/","title":{"rendered":"In defence of reviews"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Doug Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, published an enormous review article in 2009 on iron chelation and disease. The review had 2,469 references. (<a href=\"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1186\/1755-8794-2-2\">D. B. Kell\u00a0<em>BMC Med. Genom.<\/em>\u00a0<strong>2<\/strong>,\u00a02;\u00a02009<\/a>). I&#8217;m not sure what the record for a single article is, but that is certainly a large number of references to have read and digested for a review.<\/p>\n<p>It is not surprising, therefore, to find Doug Kell speaking up in favour of review articles in a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/nature\/journal\/v490\/n7418\/full\/490037e.html\">brief letter<\/a>\u00a0in this week&#8217;s\u00a0<em>Nature.\u00a0<\/em>He highlights a comment in a recent news piece in\u00a0<em>Nature\u00a0<\/em>which was critical of\u00a0a new bibliometric tool because it included review articles:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Review articles, which may not add much to the research, count the same as original research papers, which contribute a great deal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Well, you can understand what they are saying. \u00a0A typical review article may be a useful round-up, but it does not usually report new knowledge. Kell&#8217;s mega-review is in a different league, and it is not surprising that he should defend the role of the review article in research. He points out that reviews turn facts into understanding:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A research paper usually provides just one or two new facts, whereas reviews synthesize our understanding more broadly and make it more concrete&#8230; some reviews summarize thousands of papers.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Open Access policies (at least, those of MRC and Wellcome) also seem to regard review articles as less valuable than original research articles. \u00a0While MRC-funded and Wellcome-funded authors must deposit all primary research articles into PubMedCentral within six months of publication, they are not obliged to do the same for review articles. I think such a requirement might cause some problems as often reviews are commissioned specifically. But I wonder whether we will at some point want to extend the OA umbrella to review articles?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Doug Kell, chief executive of the BBSRC, published an enormous review article in 2009 on iron chelation and disease. The review had 2,469 references. (D. B. Kell\u00a0BMC Med. Genom.\u00a02,\u00a02;\u00a02009). I&#8217;m not sure what the record for a single article is, &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/2012\/10\/04\/in-defence-of-reviews\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[104],"class_list":["post-1314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal-publishing","tag-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/trading-knowledge\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}