Writing a review for the Journal of Adolescence
We’re keen to encourage people to submit reviews to the Journal of Adolescence, but we realise that this can be quite a daunting process and reviews are difficult to write. We do not intend to be prescriptive about exactly how they are written, but we thought it might be useful to suggest some dos and don’ts. These are based on our experience of having review paperspeer reviewed.
To begin with
Your title needs to reflect the questions addressed in the review. Don’t be too general, or suggest it is about something it is not. From the outset be careful to define your constructs and the parameters of the review. Reviews need research aims that are clear to the reader; the review needs to answer a question. So set out the questions you are seeking to answer at the outset – make sure this is clear in the abstract as well.
Indicate what kind of review you undertook. There are lots of different kinds of reviews and they have different strengths and weaknesses. Some different types include narrative reviews, scoping reviews, systematic reviews and meta-analyses. We do not rule out any particular kinds, but we do ask that you are clear about what you did, and you explain to the reader how you did it, so that the reader has all the information they need to evaluate how confident they should be in the conclusions.
Organise your thoughts – and the paper – in a narrative that grows and makes sense for the reader. Work towards a series of well-constructed, relevant, concise paragraphs supported by referenced evidence.
Methods
There are lots of ways to write up review methods but we do feel you need to say something clear and practical about how you went about including or excluding evidence. Give some evidence that the review has been conducted systematically and is not just an opinion piece. The most important thing is transparency. The reader needs to know what you did so they can evaluate how confident they should be in your conclusions. There should almost always be a distinct methods section.
For example, scoping review study methods often follow a framework that includes (1) identifying the research question; (2) identifying relevant studies; (3) making the study selections; (4) charting the data; (5) procedures for collating, summarizing, and reporting results; and, sometimes, (6) consultation with key stakeholders.
You will almost certainly need to specify your search criteria, including the terms you used and the databases you searched, and you may want to include flow diagrams of article selection processes.
In the results and conclusions sections
In your results you will need to do more than describe a list of studies. A review has to involve considerable synthesis – you are making the job of the reader easier by doing the synthesis for them, and you should aim to help the reader to jump up to the next level of understanding without doing too much work themselves. At the end, the reader should feel that they have a better understanding of what we do and do not know in answer to clear research questions.
Summarise the extent to which the evidence addresses and answers your questions (in some cases you may have to draw from other, related research to try to get hints about which way the answer may go). You will probably need to break the results section up into a series of sub-sections that address different parts of the overall question. These should build on each other in a logical way that builds a coherent story. Work towards a clear conclusion, drawing the parts together. In the course of doing this, you will probably need to examine some of the controversies within the subject. If you're going to critically evaluate something you should be coming down on one side of the fence or the other.
To start winding up the essay, consider future avenues for research. You might go beyond the field you started in and help the reader see connections with other bodies of research and disciplines.
Finally, a brief conclusion to summarise the key points you've made, implications for practice, and where you see the field moving in to the future.