Q: Do I need any permission from the author whose paper I am using to write a review paper?

Let’s respond to your second question first as that’s the more basic one.

Writing a  review paper

A review paper, as the term suggests, is a review of (an)other paper(s) – you discuss, analyze, and comment on previously published papers. This comes under secondary research, which is research done on existing research, that is, someone else’s research. (In contrast, research conducted yourself is known as primary or original research.)

The process for writing a review paper, at a very basic level, involves going through existing literature and then discussing it in your paper in an organized way. In doing so, you need to provide references to all the papers you have mentioned in your paper.

Finally, there are two broad types of review papers, stand-alone papers that are complete reviews by themselves and reviews done as a part of a main paper. Stand-alone papers may be of three sorts: literature review, systematic review, and meta-analysis. We have provided here some links to help you get started. For more, you may look up the site using the appropriate keywords.

• A young researcher's guide to writing a literature review
• A young researcher's guide to a systematic review
• Secondary research – the basics of narrative reviews, systematic reviews, and meta-analysis
• What a journal editor expects to see in a literature review

Obtaining permissions for referenced papers

No, you do not need to obtain permission from the author(s), also because then, you’ll have to obtain permission from scores of people – writing to multitudes of authors in the process and thus taking up an immense amount of your time and energy!

What you simply need to do, as mentioned, is to list each article you have talked about in the References section toward the end of your paper. You need to do this in a particular style. We have provided relevant links below for how to do this.

• Getting the references right: citing books as a source of information
• Getting the references right: Citing social media sources
• How to include author-year citations into the text of research papers

Now, in case you plan to modify figures from these papers, you may need to obtain permission. To understand in what exact scenarios you need to do so, you may refer to these queries by other users.

• Do I need permission from the publisher of the original figures even if I have redrawn them?
• Do I need permission from the author for reusing data from a table?

Hope this helps. All the best for your review article!