2015 Charleston Library Conference

The global body of research information continues to experience unabated growth. According to recent estimates, the Pubmed database - which represents just a fraction of the total literature – adds 2 new abstracts every minute or over a million new records each year. At current rates of growth, global scientific output is set to double approximately every nine years.
Given this veritable deluge of research information, scientists and researchers cannot be expected to identify and examine in detail every new paper that is relevant to their interests. Despite great advances in library technologies this century it takes scientists and academics no less time to read, comprehend, and assess the relevance of a paper today; and there are just far too many papers to read.
We propose to organize a session that focuses on the current uses, issues and opportunities for review journals to serve the research community. This session will highlight approaches by different publishers of review articles, who will discuss their models for leveraging the disciplinary knowledge, expertise and experience of their authors to assist researchers in navigating through the vast - and ever-expanding – corpus of research information. We will reveal how: reviews succinctly summarize the current understanding of a given topic, often synthesizing findings from a hundred or more primary articles; provide a historic overview of the development of the topic; synthesize and integrate diverse aspects of the topic; and they identify holes in knowledge and opportunities for future research directions.