Studying review articles in scientometrics and beyond: a research agenda

Review articles are an often neglected genre in scholarly communication. Though there was intense discussion about review articles in scientometrics in the 1970s and 1980s, we find less studies devoted to this genre within the last 20 years. Yet, recent discussions in other fields, such as linguistics, sociology or medicine imply that review articles are part of important debates about problems of research in academia, such as research quality or transparency. Against that background, the purpose of this paper is to review recent developments for the study of review articles in scientometrics and beyond, to discuss theoretical, conceptual and empirical accounts of how review articles can be defined, and to identify major methodological and conceptual challenges for studying review articles. Based on reviewing work and inputs received from of a workshop conducted at a Conference of the International Society of Informetrics in September 2019, we propose a research agenda for the study of review articles. We have identified six realms of study in this area: (1) the study of methodological caveats resulting from the usage of scholarly databases, (2) the study of field specific patterns of reception and usage of review articles, (3) the study of argumentative and textual structures of review articles, (4) the exploration of organizations and infrastructures for review articles, (5) the study of epistemic roles of review articles, and (6) the analysis of authorship patterns in review articles.