Q: Can I use a review article for writing a review article?

Detailed Question -

I am not sure about the type of articles to be used for review articles.

1 Answer to this question
Answer:

There are two things you wish to know about writing a review article, whether you can use previous review articles and the exact kind of articles you need to use for your article.

To answer the first question, you can refer to previous review articles to get an idea of how they approached the topic and summarized previous research, but you should not base your article on other review articles. It has to be based on previous primary research, not previous secondary research. You may of course go through the references section of these previous review articles to read up the original articles and then include those as needed.

About the nature of the articles to be used, apart from being primary research, you need to think of the recency, especially because, due to the COVID-19 situation, most researchers are presently doing only literature reviews. So, depending on your field, topic, and research question, you may want to avoid referring to papers that some other paper has already referred to. Additionally, you may want to consider grey or unpublished literature, which includes preprints (which too have gained in popularity due to the pandemic situation) and conference abstracts and proceedings. However, as you may understand, you will need to exercise some caution with these are these are not peer-reviewed.

For more information on literature reviews, you may refer to these resources:

And for more help with writing a literature review, you may check out these courses:

Note: They are available on R Upskill, a sister brand offering learning programs for various aspects of a researcher’s work, including writing, ethics, and career progression. Do feel free to check it out (especially as the entire suite of courses is available for free for a short while).

Hope that helps. All the best for your review paper!

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