About 10 years ago, observing on the one hand the high levels of unemployment and underemployment of Ph.D. scientists and, on the other, the need for more good literature reviews, I suggested that science reviewing would become a full-time career. Review articles have become increasingly important in the era of Big Science. Nowadays, many research administrators can find time only for reviews and abstracts. Naturally, the professional science review writer requires expert knowledge to control and competently summarize specialists' research. But the science reviewer also needs knowledge of information science and technology.
In fact, information science can materially aid the writer, and not only inefficiently collecting relevant sources on a particular topic. Techniques such as co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and the making of historiographs and multidimensional scaling maps of research fronts have yielded new understandings of the structure and substance of specialty areas. In the new ISI Atlas of Science, ...
