Editorial Snapshot: Do review papers reduce citations of original research?
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- Published: 2021/06/16
Review papers, which do not report original research but summarize important and recent results in a field, are generally known to play a useful curatorial role in research. It is also widely felt that review papers are more frequently cited than original papers, and studies have been conducted to quantify this phenomenon. Previously, it was reported that, across 35 scientific disciplines, review papers are cited three times more on average than original papers. More recently, a paper published in American Sociological Review aimed to investigate the connections between review papers and “scholarly attention” across a greater number of research areas, including the social sciences.