Creative destruction by review papers

Abstract

Science Communication Reviews allow scientists to curate, synthesize, and simplify individual findings into a coherent overview of a specific field. However, once the review is available, what happens to the individual findings themselves? McMahan and McFarland analyzed data from millions of journal articles to determine the consequences of review articles for the publications they cite. In general, the review is cited instead of the specific findings contained within, resulting in a loss of future citations for individual papers. Additionally, reviews lead to focused attention around key findings and the relations between them, resulting in a substantial simplification of a domain of knowledge. The authors describe this as “creative destruction,” in which those who do the science become overshadowed by those who summarize the science. Am. Sociol. Rev. 10.1177/0003122421996323 (2021).