Journal of Materials Processing Technology 212 (2012) 1–2
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Journal of Materials Processing Technology
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jmatprotec
Editorial
Writing a review paper
“Here be Dragons”! With satellite imaging we now have a nearly
perfect map of the whole of the earth’s surface. However, when
early explorers began to develop maps, their knowledge was far
from complete, so according to tradition they might mark the unex-
plored region of their maps with the phrase “Here be Dragons” to
indicate the dangers of entering unknown territory.
This is a great story, although in fact this phrase has been found
only once on an early map – on the Hunt-Lenox Globe which is cur-
rently in the New York Public Library and is named, not after its
creator, but after two collectors who purchased it in the 19th cen-
tury. However the phrase “Here be Dragons” has created a legend,
and has been widely used in fictional accounts of early exploration.
It also gives us a nice way to think about writing an excellent
review paper: research is about exploring unknown territory; good
research begins at the limits of what is already known; therefore
the purpose of a good review paper is to define accurately the limits
of the unexplored area.
Sadly almost all reviews that we read do not meet this require-
ment. Instead, they provide a catalogue of several papers, often
with one paragraph describing each paper and with no connections
made between them. We can evaluate this approach by thinking
about David Livingstone setting off to search for the source of the
Nile in the 1860s armed with a catalogue of known cities in Africa
and the dates when they were first named: however complete and
accurate the catalogue it would have been of no use to the explorer,
as it provides no knowledge of how the cities connect, or about the
outcomes of previous explorations.
If we are going to create a useful map of a new area, we cer-
tainly require a complete catalogue of all known places. But the map
will only be useful to other explorers if this catalogue is organised
and laid out to show how existing knowledge connects, and thus
to show precisely which areas have not yet been explored. This is
precisely the function of a good review paper: firstly to collect the
complete catalogue of knowledge; then to organise it to demon-
strate clearly what is known and what is unknown. We will think
separately about these two stages.
To write a good review we must first identify and read all the
papers in our area of interest. This is hard work, particularly when
the literature spans different languages, in which case the review
is best written by a team of authors able to cover each different
language. However this work has been made very much easier
by on-line search engines such as ISI Web of Science and Scopus.
Once we identify a relevant paper, we can expand the catalogue
is to search from it forwards, backwards and sideways: forwards
to papers that have cited it; backwards through the paper’s refer-
ence list; sideways to other papers written by the same authors. It
0924-0136/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jmatprotec.2011.09.003
is particularly important to complete the backwards search early
on – for two reasons: firstly, knowledge is built in layers, and we
always want to be accurate in recording the contributions of the
major scientists whose work has laid the way for our own efforts;
secondly, many of the foundations of today’s research in materials
processing technology were laid in papers written in the 1950s and
1960s when volumes of publication were much lower than today.
So, if a subject springs from a key paper in this period, a search for
all subsequent works that have cited the original paper will often
help to reveal key areas of our catalogue. It should be obvious that
identifying the catalogue of papers is simply a pre-cursor to reading
them: abstracts are a useful guide to what is likely to be in a paper,
but when we quote previous work we want to report (a) what
the authors claim, (b) what evidence they provide to support their
claim and (c) how we evaluate their claim. This helps the reader
see precisely how each paper contributes to current knowledge –
and requires diligent hard work.
However all this work is still only the first stage of writing a
review paper – because all we have done so far is to create a cat-
alogue. Now we need to organise it to show what is known and
unknown. Sometimes a review paper is described as a “survey”
which can mean both “a general or comprehensive view of some-
thing as a whole” and “the process of surveying any part of the
earth’s surface, so as to be able to delineate or describe it accu-
rately and in detail.” Maps are a convenient visual representation
of the second type of survey, but in a review paper we largely
need to describe our survey in words – so the success of the sec-
ond stage of writing the review depends on the way we choose
to structure our description. Remember that the description must
include both what is known and what is not known – where be
Dragons?
This seems rather daunting, but we have found that a very useful
way to identify the gaps in knowledge is to remember why we
are trying to create knowledge in the first place. Most research on
materials processing technologies is based on analysis: we monitor
what happens to the output of a process as we change some of
the inputs to it, and then aim to explain what we have observed.
However, the users of these technologies do not want knowledge
in this form – instead they want synthesis: if I want to end up with
a product of some specification, what input settings should I use?
So a great way to identify where be the dragons is to start from the
view point of the final users, and ask “what do I not know about
how to make the products I want?”
In fact it is very helpful when providing the survey in written
form to cover the ground more than once, so that the reader’s
mental map of the area becomes richer with each pass. In a well
2 Editorial / Journal of Materials Processing Technology 212 (2012) 1–2
structured review, it is likely that the key papers will be cited
several times – to help the reader see how existing knowledge con-
nects and leaves gaps. Here are some of the layers that might occur
in a good review:
• History: who were the pioneers of the subject under review, and
how has knowledge built up from their work to the present? What
other factors have influenced this development?
• Techniques: what numerical and experimental techniques have
been used to analyse the subject?
• Analysis results: what key insights into behaviour have emerged
from this numerical and experimental analysis?
• Synthesis: compared to what we would like to know in order to
operate the process perfectly, what do we not yet know? Where
are the dragons?
We have written several review papers in the past few years,
and with no claims to have found the ideal solution yet, have
listed them as the references to this article, so you can evalu-
ate the extent to which we have met the ideals we have set
out here. To summarise: a review paper is not a catalogue but
can only be written when you have identified and read the
catalogue of all key papers in an area; a good review paper
will show the reader where knowledge is complete and where
there are gaps by comparing existing knowledge with the ideal
understanding we would like to have. Writing a review is there-
fore hard work, but an extremely valuable exercise in preparing
for a major research programme – and if done well, of great
value to other researchers. We encourage review papers in JMPT,
but ask that if you are considering writing one, you contact
us first to confirm that it fits our aims and scope, and does
not overlap too much with recent reviews or those already in
process.
A review paper shows precisely what is known already, and how
it connects in order to reveal where the dragons might be, so that
subsequent researchers can go and look for them.
Further reading
Allwood, J.M., 2005. Survey and performance assessment of solution methods for
elastic rough contact problems. ASME Journal of Tribology 127 (1), 10–23.
Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., Stanistreet, T.F., 2005a. The development of ring rolling
technology: Part 2. Steel Research International 76 (7), 491–507.
Allwood, J.M., Tekkaya, A.E., Stanistreet, T.F., 2005b. The development of ring rolling
technology: Part 1. Steel Research International 76 (2/3), 111–120.
Music, O., Allwood, J.M., Kawai, K.-I., 2010. A review of the mechanics of metal
spinning. Journal of Materials Processing Technology 210 (1), 3–23.
Karbasian, H., Tekkaya, A.E., 2010. A review on hot stamping. Journal of Materials
Processing Technology 210 (15), 2103–2118.
Psyk, V., Risch, D., Kinsey, B.L., Tekkaya, A.E., Kleiner, M., 2011. Electromagnetic
forming – a review. Journal of Materials Processing Technology 211 (5), 787–829.
Editor-in-Chief
Julian M. Allwood ∗
Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge,
United Kingdom
Editor-in-Chief
A. Erman Tekkaya
Institute of Forming Technology and Lightweight
Construction, Technische Universität Dortmund,
Germany
∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +44 01223 338181;
fax: +44 01223 332643.
E-mail address: engjmpt@hermes.cam.ac.uk (J.M.
Allwood)
30 August 2011
Available online 10 September 2011