Review Articles

Review articles are not written on one’s own initiative, but at the request of the editors of a handbook or an encyclopedia intended to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of knowledge in a specific field of research. Authors are asked either to cover a defined subfield or to attempt to provide a kind of summary at the end of the book. Surprisingly, such articles—and the handbooks in which they appear—are rarely read, even though editors and authors generally put a great deal of effort into them. In fact, review articles could facilitate communication within a research field—particularly between different generations of researchers—and serve to represent and codify the field to the outside world.