Editorial Ten Simple Rules for Writing a Literature Review

Literature reviews are in great demand in most scientific fields. Their need stems from the ever-increasing output of scien-tific publications [1]. For example, com-pared to 1991, in 2008 three, eight, and forty times more papers were indexed in Web of Science on malaria, obesity, and biodiversity, respectively [2]. Given such mountains of papers, scientists cannot be expected to examine in detail every single new paper relevant to their interests [3]. Thus, it is both advantageous and neces-sary to rely on regular summaries of the recent literature. Although recognition for scientists mainly comes from primar