How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022
Preparing an outline
How to write a review paper
Doing other writing for publication
Unlike research papers, there is no prescribed organization for conventional review papers. Therefore, you will have to develop your own. A cardinal rule for writing a review paper is to prepare an outline.
The outline must be prepared carefully. It will assist you in organizing your paper, which is all-important. If your review is organized properly, its overall scope will be well defined and the integral parts will fit together in a logical order.
Obviously, you must prepare the outline before you start writing (although you may end up revising it as you write). Moreover, before you start writing, it is wise to determine whether a journal (either a review journal or a primary journal that includes review articles) would be interested in considering a review article that you submit on the topic. Possibly, the editor will want to limit or expand the scope of your proposed review or add or delete specific subtopics. Or perhaps the journal is already publishing a review on the subject, in which case you should direct your efforts elsewhere.
Not only is the outline essential for the preparer of the review, it is also very useful to potential readers of the review. Therefore, many review journals print the outline at the beginning of the article, where it serves as a convenient table of contents for prospective readers.
Also to guide readers, review papers make considerable use of subheadings (which, if an outline is published, correspond to the subjects that it lists). For example, the review paper “Mechanics of Cytokinesis in Eukaryotes,” by Thomas D. Pollard (2010), contains the following subheadings:
Introduction
Origins of cytokinesis genes
Mechanisms specifying the position of the division plane
Fission yeast
Budding yeast
Animal cells
Mechanism of contractile ring assembly
Fission yeast
Animal cells
Architecture of the ring
Mechanism of constriction and disassembly of the contractile ring
Actin filaments
Myosin-II
Mechanism of constriction
Sources of drag
Modeling
Conclusions
In 2015, Pollard, the author of this review paper, received the National Academy of Sciences Award for Scientific Reviewing “for his many review articles describing the molecular mechanisms of the protein actin in cell motility and cell division”; it was noted that these articles “have been cited hundreds and even thousands of times.” This award, given in different years to authors in different fields, was presented from 1979 through 2020. Information on its recipients appears on the U.S. National Academy of Sciences website (nasonline.org/programs/awards/scientific-reviewing.html). To see some review papers by masters, look on this site to identify recipients in your field, and then search the literature to find their reviews.