Engineer's Guide to the Library

In this context, a review article is not like a book or movie review. Instead, it reviews, or summarizes, the current state of research in a field. The author or authors will find and read all the published research articles on a given topic, and then describes the results. What is the current consensus on the topic? What is still unknown or in dispute? What are areas of current and future research?

A recent review article is a great starting place to learn about a subject. It can quickly bring you up to date on what is happening with research in the area, and point you to research articles if you want to dig deeper.

Review articles are often published in the same scholarly journals that publish research articles, though there are some journals that only publish reviews (such journals usually have "reviews" in their titles).

Systematic Review

A systematic review is a special kind of review article that is explicit and systematic in the methods it uses to find and evaluate research articles. Some systematic reviews use meta-analysis, statistical techniques to combine the results from similar studies into a larger, and hopefully more accurate, result. Both systematic reviews and meta-analysis originated in medical research, where they are often used to provide evidence-based evaluations of clinical evaluations, but are now also used outside of medicine.

Identifying a Review Article

Indications that an article is a review article:

• It has "a review" in its title.
• It summarizes research in a field (with citations of the research articles), but does not describe original research.

Review articles can be found using the same approach as research articles. If you have a citation for a particular review article you want to find, see the section of this guide on Accessing Articles, Books, etc., from Citation.

If you are looking for review articles on a topic, see the section on Finding Articles and Conference Proceedings on a Topic. During Step 4: Search in Databases, there are two ways to limit your results to review articles.Some databases include a type refinement for review articles; selecting that type will limit the results to review articles. If using a database that doesn't include such a refinement, add the word "review" to your search string. Not every result will be a review article (some research articles may use the word), but the results will be more likely to be reviews, and you can quickly scan them to see if they are actual review articles. (This approach is more effective if you use a database's advanced search to look for "review" in the title of the article.)