Have we reached the beginning of the end for review papers?

Abstract Review papers have traditionally enjoyed a high status in academic publishing. This is due to the role that reviews and surveys can play in summarizing and synthesizing a field of research. From an author’s perspective, reviews have the added advantage that they pick up significantly more citations than primary research papers presenting original research. There has been a dramatic increase in the publication of review papers in recent years, both in raw numbers and as a proportion of overall publication output. In this paper we demonstrate this increase across a wide range of fields of study. We demonstrate that there is indeed a citation dividend associated with review papers although this dividend is declining. We also show that, since the arrival of Generative AI (GenAI) tools in 2022 there is evidence of wide use of GenAI in review paper writing. The use of GenAI tools seems to be more prevalent in review papers than in primary research papers. We suggest that the potential for GenAI to do a lot of the work in preparing review papers will have a significant impact on their status.