The review-writers --- Hi Aura, Just browsing again trough the past lecture, and I thought I answer your question for the area I'm familiar with, medicine. Basically anybody is encouraged to write reviews, and I know an independent physiotherapist with no academic ambition who wrote a very good review on shoulder pain treatment. As I said before, it's extremely time consuming, and the reward is low, since you spend hours on other peoples work (one of the BIG tasks is to select the studies you will include, on the basis of different kind of errors in different -published- studies). What you find reflects what others have studied AND published (although for the last one things are about to change, because the bias of publication is already a significant one). In general, review writers are hard workers, not so focussed on themselves and what they think, and not necessarily experts of the subject themselves (the PH institute where I worked did reviews on surgical procedures without a surgeon working on it). So in a way boundary spanners between scientists with potentially different hypothesis.

Source author: Katharina Beyer katharina.beyer@etu.unige.ch