#39 Research or Review paper?

Research or review paper?

Let’s look at the main differences and how these matter in your research career.

Research Papers: Original Contributions

Research papers present new findings.

They’re your chance to make an original and unique contribution.

Research papers present new findings that can potentially have a high impact (societal, economic, commercial etc…).

Research papers are also a major vehicle for building someone’s reputation in a specific niche.

In many countries/research institutions, research papers are used as a key element in research evaluation programs for researchers to secure promotion, tenure etc.

Typically, publishing a research article is the way to go when you have access to unique data/methods, and you have a critical research gap to address.

However, such publications require significant time.

But also, time to publish the findings in high-quality journals.

Review Papers: Showcasing Expertise

Review papers summarize existing research.

They give a comprehensive overview of a topic.

So, instead of reading hundreds of publications about that topic in detail, you could read a review to quickly learn about that topic.

Publishing a review paper also helps you to showcase your broad knowledge about specific topics.

At the same time, they’re very useful to identify research gaps.

Of course, they’re less oriented toward original findings.

You also need significant time to cover and synthesize a relatively high number of publications.

Generally, researchers usually publish reviews to consolidate what we know about a field at a specific point in time.

Early career researchers publish review papers to showcase broad expertise.

You could also do so when moving to a new research topic.

Another use case: your review paper can help you justify funding needs to work on a bigger research project.

As an indirect consequence, your review paper might help you establish connections with more senior researchers in your field whom you have cited in your review.

Well, that's all for this week.

Let us know in the comments if you have other suggestions.

As always, if you need clarification or assistance with your research projects, feel free to reach out to me, and I will respond.

See you next Sunday!

Jamal

My favorite things this week

1. A webinar with researchers and PhD students from Morocco about Journal Citation Reports.

2. Online Training session on EndNote desktop for a University in Saudi Arabia.