Choosing a Topic and Finding a Review
In choosing a topic and finding a supporting review, there are two paths you can go down. The divergence of those paths centers around how well formed your idea of a topic is. The two options are:

• No Idea At All
  Without a firm idea of a topic, what you will need to do is survey the literature to find a topic. This is a rather daunting undertaking, unless you know where to look for a novel and exciting review article. The first place I would recommend looking is the journal Trends in Biochemical Sciences, also known as TIBS. This journal publishes short reviews (usually under ten pages) on very current topics (both biological systems as well as methods). You can be sure that a recent TIBS review will open to a wealth of active primary literature.
  There are some other places to search for a topic and matching review. Many journals publish only reviews, or a reasonable number of reviews in addition to primary research reports. Below is a non-exhaustive list in alphabetical order.
  
  • Current Opinion in Biotechnology
  • Current Opinion in Chemical Biology
  • Current Opinion in Structural Biology
  • Progress in Lipid Research
  • Trends in Biochemical Sciences
  • Trends in Biotechnology
  • Trends in Molecular Medicine
  
  
• I Know Exactly What I Would Like To Study
  With a firm idea of what you would like to write on, the only challenge is finding a review paper which matches your topic. To find a review paper on a particular topic, you'll need to go to an indexing service and search for a matching paper.
  
  PubMed is the largest and most easily accessed index of the biochemical literature (along with medical literature). To find recent review articles at PubMed, limit your search in the following ways:
  
  • Type of Article = Review
  • Dates => "Specify date range" => Date Published 2019/01/01 to today
  • And any other particulars that might help narrow your search (such as limiting the search to English language journals)
  
  The SciFinder application integrates literature citations with molecular and reaction data. SciFinder will have information about topics of both biochemistry and chemistry, along with chemical engineering and biomedical engineering content. To find a recent review in SciFinder, login, enter your topic/keyword, click "Advanced Search" and limit your search in the following ways:
  
  • Publication Years = 2019-
  • Document Types = Review
  
  The Web of Knowledge is a commercial product of Thomson Reuters (formerly Thomson ISI, calculators of the Impact Factor). The web of science catalogs similar content to PubMed and provides links to all citations in a paper as well as links to papers citing that paper (what you need to calculate an impact factor). To find recent review articles in the Web of Knowledge, limit your search in the following ways:
  
  • Uncheck the "Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)"
  • Click the "From" radio button and change the lower end of the range to 2019.
  • Restrict the language to English.
  • Restrict the document type to "Review."

The Justification
Since you will be committing a grand amount of time toward the study of this topic, now is the time to justify that topic. Why is it valuable for you to research and write on your topic of interest? Now, this isn't just an exercise, scientists (both in academics as well as those in industry, and most everyone else working in research and development) are often ask to justify their work on a particular topic for money, time or both. It is good to be in the habit of knowing the reasons why you work on something and being able to describe those reasons to someone in a short conversation.
Your justification is limited to one paragraph. In that paragraph you should establish the large, over-arching question, your topic in particular as well as argue for the significance or importance of this topic. Another way to think of these requirements is to picture an hour glass. You would like to bring the reader from all the ideas of the world to your topic and from your narrow topic out to all the ramifications. Now, in one paragraph, you'll need to choose carefully what to include and what to exclude (but don't abandon what you don't use here, it can make its way into your paper).

The Citation
A citation for your review article is the final element you need. All citations in this course will use the style of the journal Biochemistry, an American Chemical Society Publication. The format for a citation is given in the Reference Guidelines. All journals provide a similar document to authors which describes the style guidelines for publication in that journal. While the journal will ulimately be responsible for typesetting the article, the author must prepare their manuscript in the style required by the journal.