I'm just starting out my research career (first year PhD) and have been able to get a review article and an opinion article accepted for publication. I have just been asked to co-author another review article but I do not yet have any results from my own research published. While I should be able to publish some results soon I was just wondering if it looked bad to have a large amount of your published works made up of reviews/opinion articles?
Hi Laura,
I don't necessarily think publishing reviews will be looked down upon. Your contributions to those articles will still reflect your knowledge of the research topic and will demonstrate that you can follow through all the way to the publication stage. Some of the staff at my research institution in Australia encourage all PhD students to do systematic reviews at the very beginning of their projects and to publish if possible. Congratulations on your recent publications and good luck with your own research, it takes time but it is very good to have a few papers under your belt as you get your results together!
Dear Laura;
In the first steps in our scientific living, I think the "number" of our published articles and also their "quality", is more important than the type of them. in addition, writing reviews in the area of your interest or subspeciality, help you to gain more in-depth knowledge and helps to improve your researches quality with evaluating other's. But keep in mind that todays, most journals do not accept simple reviews for publication, so if you decide to write a review, I suggest that: write a "systematic review"
Dear Laura.
I had to agree with both Kourosh and Nicholas. All of us really start writing review articles while waiting for our data base and analysis to provide the basis for a manuscript. Review articles increase you knowledge in that field and in many occasion may give you ideas to start a new project.
Personally I wrote 2 systemic review articles in the beginning and each one gave me good understanding of the literature and gave me the ability to look for unanswered questions that led for many publications.
Also the review articles will be good exercise for you to get better in academic writing and help you improve the quality of your writing.
I agree with Nicholas, Kourosh and Zaher. Laura, I hope you find the comments reassuring.
If you can write and publish contributable review articles, I guess there should not be any limit! If your written review articles are accepted by peer reviewed (ISI indexed) journals, that means of course your knowledge and opinion can make a difference. Even sometimes to maintain your scholarship (Ph.D scholarships in Malaysia are provided initially for 1 year, based on your publications it can be extended up to 3 years), you need to publish review articles as original research takes time to publish. Besides comprehensive review, you can consider to write meta-analysis and systematic reviews as well. Good Luck!
Hi there;
I will say a little about my personal experience on this.
The first article i ever published was a letter to the editor, then a review and so on.
It later opened the gate for other research opportunities and it helped me a lot to be able to map the literature regarding different subjects.
Good luck
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