Why are review articles cited more frequently than original research articles?

Question

Review articles generally receive more citations compared to original research articles.

In my mind, it should be the other way around, as journal guidelines generally solicit researchers to cite original research articles rather than review articles. So reviews should only be cited after their original content, which tends to be a small fraction of their total content, while the largest part of it consists of paraphrasing and citing research articles.

Therefore, I would venture to believe that reviews receive more citations because the rule I mentioned previously is generally not followed; and that authors usually cite reviews to avoid taking time to search for original articles (which I have to admit can be exhausting, and extremely time-consuming).

Can someone corroborate if this is the case, or am I missing something? Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't recall ever being told, by journal guidelines or by an editor, that I should always cite the original paper instead of a review. The review would usually contain citations of the original publications.

A review can be cited as a single source for lots of facts, especially in the "introduction" or "background" sections of a paper. So it's likely to be more useful for the reader. A good review is also likely to be easier for many readers to understand than the original paper. And the review might be where I originally learned the information I need. Finally, a review is likely to use uniform notation that I can adopt, whereas the original papers are more likely to have diverging notation, which may make it difficult for readers to compare them with my paper and with each other.

I've often written things like "see [review] and the references there"; no one has yet complained.

Answer 2

Many papers have background that touches on enough different areas that citing all the original research in those areas would quickly balloon a paper to thousands of references. Therefore, it's common practice to cite authoritative reviews, plus specific individual papers of the highest relevance.

The direction to:

cite original research articles rather than review articles

...only applies when you are discussing specific findings. If you are referring to Alice's paper, you should cite Alice, not Bob's review of several papers including Alice's. If you are referring to a whole area of research that has been nicely summarized by Bob and includes papers by Alice, Jane, Jesse and Richard, you can (and should!) cite Bob.

If anything, it's a form of plagiarism of Bob if you were to read Bob's review, find that Bob has collected papers from Alice, Jane, Jesse, and Richard, and cite those papers rather than Bob (it would be okay to cite Bob plus the others if they are sufficiently important; if I do this I make clear that the citations were found via Bob, even if I'm familiar with the other papers individually as well). Collecting papers in a review is an intellectual endeavor that deserves citation.

I think the general claim that review articles are cited more frequently than original research is false, but I don't have great data to support that besides my own papers: reviews make up a minority of citations in a single paper.

However, my impression is that there are a handful of very highly cited reviews, often by respected researchers in particular fields, and also lots of reviews that are hardly cited at all. Those highly respected reviews collect citations from a very broad area of research and their citation counts balloon well over that of any individual paper in the same broad area.

Answer 3

You should ask yourself, what is the purpose of a citation?

I read your perspective as: the purpose is to award credit (like "points") to research that originated an idea.

That is one of the purposes, but there are others. An important purpose is giving the reader a reference for a claim or statement, so they can go learn more about it. Review articles are generally better for this.

Another purpose is to establish credibility for a claim or statement. If I write "researchers generally consider approach A more promising", then a review article demonstrating this has more credibility than an opinion expressed in one research paper.

Answer 4

I agree with the previous posts, but would add that there are a few additional aspects of reviews that merit high citation counts:

• Most researchers start by reading a review when getting into a new topic. Since reviews are "introductory material", naturally, many people have read them and therefore many people are likely to cite them.
• A review has a broader audience than a research article since it may cover e.g. five subfields instead of a specific question in one subfield. Therefore many different types of people can use them, relative to an article which has a narrower focus.
• Reviews bring value in and of themselves. For example, they might outline the history of a research area; they might compare and contrast different articles' view points; or they might point to key areas for future work. These are independent contributions in and of themselves and should be cited as such.

As you note, it is easier to cite a review than read sub-articles, but I don't think that's the primary reason. If I am just using content from a single article, then I would cite the original article and not the review.

Answer 5

So reviews should only be cited after their original content, which tends to be a small fraction of their total content, while the largest part of it consists of paraphrasing and citing research articles.

The original and defining content of a review is the review work itself, that is the comparison of the knowledge record about a topic. It is a lot of scientific work. A review article is like the embryonic form of a book.

Conversely, too many "original" research articles fail to link their content to the state of the art. I am not surprised any longer of finding that the literature review in the introductions is just name dropping: I often go and browse the cited papers only not to find any supporting information to the citing paper. And, incidentally, when I review papers in the sense of peer reviewing, I always look through at least some of the articles the authors have cited. Disappointing incidents happened to me even for work published by associate editors.

Anyhow, the attribution original for any standard publication is possibly a name of convenience and creates a false dichotomy: you could call it incremental research for example. (I have seen now that Elsevier calls them "regular articles").

The point I cherish is that one should only cite what one has read, preferably perused, preferably not just glanced at. As a reader I want to know what you considered to build your arguments. If you read a review article and are happy about the comparison and conclusions drawn there, cite it. If you went further and looked into some other publication, whether or not cited in the review, cite that.

About reading papers and the fact that it

can be exhausting, and extremely time-consuming

I do concur. This is particularly true of badly written papers, that is for which authors have not taken sufficient time for writing well, beside that for reading well, but that's another story.