Critical review of literature: The case of the news and views genre

Abstract

Review genres (e.g., literature review, critical review) are useful for developing students’ abilities to evaluate literature critically; they have been widely used in university contexts as assessment tasks. The ‘news and views’ article is one such review genre which is often included in science journals and which is increasingly used as an assessment task in graduate science courses. Published ‘News and views’ articles provide a synopsis and critique of a research article. Usually written by a senior researcher, they provide a good exemplar of critique. To investigate how ‘news and views’ articles persuade readers of their assessment of published studies, this article analyses the rhetorical moves and stance and engagement markers of published news and views articles. Findings were that moves in news and views articles had similarities with those in both research articles and review genres such as book reviews. Similar stance and engagement resources were used in news and views articles and research articles, but they were more frequent in news and views articles than in research articles. Based on this analysis, pedagogical applications for teaching critical evaluation of literature are discussed.

Introduction

Graduate science students need to develop skills in evaluating innovative science practice, applying critical and analytical skills by identifying gaps in the existing literature and communicating effectively with academic and industry audiences.² The ‘news and views’ genre, is widely used by science lecturers as an assessment task to foster these skills (e.g., University of Technology Sydney; The Australian National University; University of Michigan; University of Notre Dame, USA).³ ‘News and views’ is a short article type (approximately 1000 words long) published in science journals. It focuses on a single research article (occasionally two), usually in the same journal as the News and views article, which the editors have selected as significant and worthy of focus. News and views articles thus serve to announce important advances by summarising a newly published journal article (news), and in the same article providing a short review of the article (views). Writers of ‘news and views’ articles are usually senior researchers in the field invited to contribute the news and views article by the editors, while the target reader is an informed disciplinary insider but not necessarily a specialist in the field. Although news and views articles have some similarities with research articles (e.g., claiming centrality of the topic, making topic generalisations), in contrast to research article authors, writers of news and views articles are not the author of the study and thus have a different relationship with the audience and with the subject matter. This leads us to expect differences in rhetorical moves and in use of evaluative and persuasive language in news and views articles compared with research articles.

Like review articles, news and views articles are written by experienced researchers, and they therefore provide an exemplar for graduate student writers who are learning to review and critique literature. Critical evaluation is an essential element in academic writing, particularly for graduate students. Yet expressing evaluative judgements about literature can be difficult for students, as publication gives an article status which students can find hard to challenge. Therefore, unpacking the rhetorical and lexico-grammatical resources used in critical evaluation can be useful in tertiary education for teaching critical review of literature. This article presents a way to teach the critical review using the news and views genre as an exemplar. We base our suggestions on two kinds of analysis of the language in news and views articles. Firstly, we present an analysis of the genre features of news and views articles. Secondly, we present the results of an analysis of lexico-grammatical resources for expressing stance, which is useful for students in fine-tuning the critical resources in creating an appropriate disciplinary persona and appropriate relationship with their reader. We include in this analysis a comparison with the resources used to express stance in research articles, which allows us to comment on the usefulness of the news and views genre for developing the ability to write other academic genres. Finally, we discuss the study’s applications for the teaching of critical review of literature to graduate students.