What is a Review Article

What is a Review Article and Why so Many Articles are Written?

1. What is a Review Article and Why it is Needed?

Articles vary depending on their content, publication source, authors, and audience, and thus a simple question arises: What is a review article and a common review article definition? The term is widely used to describe a critical analysis of a literary piece that helps students and researchers to understand and assess one or more important aspects of a discussed text.

2. About Review Articles

Information about review articles is available on the Internet and introduces readers to different reviews. Therefore, such a type of an analysis is often regarded as a critical review article. However, review articles are distinguished by their types.

3. Types of Review Articles

Before writing an article review paper, one should know that there are many types of review articles and focus on one. Depending on a methodological approach, types of objectives, or types by mandate, one may find, for example, a narrative review, history review, theory review, commissioned reviews, and others. This article review difference should be considered in the process of writing.

4. Structure of Review Articles

Review articles may be complicated. Thus, to provide a good paper, one may use an article review worksheet and have an article review rubric to make sure that a paper includes the following elements and follows a proper article review format:

1. Title. This element helps to understand the subject matter of an article and should be informative enough to include terms and a message. Moreover, it should be short (8-12 words) and written in the present tense.
2. Authors. Names of contributors should be given to establish intellectual ownership and be in a form of a list. An author who wrote the major part of an article should be listed first, and an author of the original idea and a coordinator should be listed last.
3. Abstract. This part informs the readers about objectives, results, and conclusions of a review article.
4. Table of contents. Article review contents illustrate the organization of the article.
5. Introduction. A good introduction should be up to three paragraphs (10-20% of the work) and discuss importance of a topic/motivation, a research question, focus, and structure. Additionally, it should include citations.
6. Materials and methods. This part should be devoted to a discussion of sources (references provided), terms, strategies, and criteria methods of an analysis.
7. Main body. 70-90% of an article should cover ideas, theories, studies, and analyze a research question in detail. It should include subheadings and each paragraph should have a specific idea. Moreover, an article review discussion should explain relationships between studies, compare and contrast various conclusions, and support information with citations.
8. Conclusions. It is better to start a conclusion with a direct and explicit answer to a research question. Then, findings and their implications should be described in addition to interpretations of findings of other scientists and unresolved issues. An article review conclusion should be 5-10% of the text.
9. Acknowledgements. This element is added to express gratitude. Therefore, full names of people, as well as programs and agencies involved in the project, should be provided.
10. References. All the sources mentioned in the text should be provided in this section. References help to acknowledge ideas of other people and avoid plagiarism. It is recommended avoiding Internet sources and focusing on peer-reviewed works. Generally, 50-100 references are required for an article review.
11. Illustrations. Supplementary materials should be provided and include, for example, concept maps, the legend, notes, and a glossary.

Knowledge of this structure and necessary elements contributes to article review education and helps to produce a good article.