can anyone tell- I am planning to publish a review article form my literature review. But I don knw whether it meets the standard or not. Can anyone advise- what are the standard for a review article to be publishable?

One journal editor in my university advised us to avoid high impact journal in our first attempt.
His first paper was rejected; one of the comments was something like worthless paper.
Don't worry. Just try again and again. Invest books on "how to publish your paper"...

But if you are willing to pay, some open-access journals are willing to publish.

Hi Zheng,

generally it is harder to publish a literature review than a research paper (at least in science) because editors are less interested in publishing reviews than original research, so it can get rejected although it is a good piece of work. Some people get invited by the editor to write a review on a specific topic. Other academics might approach an editor and ask if he is interested in publishing a review paper. The paper still goes under peer review as normal.

I managed to publish my literature review and gets more citations than any other research paper! I put a lot of effort in producing a decent chapter and I thought it would be a waste if it was not published. I genuinely feel that a lit review is harder work than publishing results and sets out the basis for your PhD.

Zheng,

In conjunction with my PhD supervisor and another colleague, we created a review from the literature reviews of mainly my thesis (the most up-to-date) and my two predecessors theses.

The review in our case was basically just an enhanced literature review of our field. Essentially, we took the three literature reviews, cut, paste, read through and edited them for new findings by ourselves, other researchers and groups to tie all the information together. Different areas of the review were covered by diffferent sections. We introduced a little new unpublished data of our own and a collaberating group whilst we were about it. It was time consuming (nine months part time), but not too difficult in our case to do. Others will have different experiences.

The one issue you do need to be sure about is permission of copyright owners to use graphs and data. This was discussed very extensively on here previously (see link at end - and there are different interpretations of the law on copyright - the UK is amongst the strictest).

If you copy large amounts of data then you need to seek permission of the copyright holders. However, if you are quoting information and data for the purposes of criticism and review (the odd quote or key equation here and there as per your thesis literature review) then as long as you refefence the copyright holder (as you do in your thesis via your bibliography) you should be okay. The odd diagram should be okay (no more than one from each reviewed paper or document) as long as the original author is acknowledged (again via your bibliography).

As we used large sections from my and both my predecessors theses and also a research group at another University, then I, my predecessors and a representative from the other University's research group had to sign permission forms. If in doubt about how much is too much, ask for written permission to play safe.

Send me a PM and I may be able to help you a little further.

Hope that helps,

Ian (Mackem_Beefy)