There has been a proliferation of review articles and review journals over the last decade, and it is easy to see why. Biologists find them useful to keep up with increasingly complex science, and publishers find them an easy way to increase the impact factor of journals. Unfortunately, the reasons why review articles are highly cited are mostly unrelated to their educational value. Instead, it seems mostly due to their increasing use as a surrogate for the primary literature.
Many years ago, the privilege of writing review articles was usually reserved for the most senior of scientists, who would describe the most significant findings in their fields from the previous decade. These would appear in specialized publications, such as the Annual Review of Biochemistry. The topics were specialized and were only chosen for review if sufficient progress had been made to justify a conceptual update. I found these types of ...
