Can You Help Me Determine If Permissions Are Necessary for a Review?

Can you help me determine if permissions are necessary for a review article I'm writing that I intend to publish independently on my own website, available for purchase as a PDF?

You can publish alone. You need time, method, ability to write concisely and an approach strategy. I am no expert, but I have just completed (nearly), 5 systematic reviews in quick succession. It has nearly killed me, but I now feel partially qualified to answer this question. I’ll be honest and admit that I didn't have a very good plan when I started. There are several standards methods you can follow; I used the PRISMA guidance , but followed it loosely. Trouble with a lot of these standard ‘methods’, is that t’re often meant for medical science, which means there are aspects that need to be adapted for other subject types. In my field, the quality of literature available is generally so poor, that if I applied the kind of rigour required for medical science, I would end up rejecting most documents. I can’t give you full instructions, so these are just some very brief notes - you will need to research how to do it yourself. Broadly, you need to start with aims and objectives and one or more specific research questions Search databases for papers - develop ‘boolean operators’ to help you (aka ‘search terms’) Once you have found all your papers (sometimes many thousands of documents), you need to narrow them down according to some criteria or other, usually these steps. Remove duplicates appearing in search results from several databases. Screen titles and remove irrelevant material. Read abstracts thoroughly. If t aren’t relevant to your subject reject them from your enquiry - at this point, I suggest you ‘code’ the ones you keep. Mark them for appocat[biliary so you can screen them later. By now you should have no more than a couple of hundred…. Hopefully. Scan the papers in more detail and remove those that don’t meet your criteria - perhaps, reject those which don’t statistically test their results, or those with a vague/unclear method. Maybe you only want to include papers with a type of result - for instance in my field, I might only include ones that calculated a risk quotient. You need to be brutal here because whatever you have left you will need to read in much more detail, your criteria will dictate how narrow your final pool of papers will be. Read and compare the papers. I suggest you try to compare data in tables - this will make it easier to base your discussion around something. Of course your review doesn’t have to be systematic, but having a system adds rigorous and credibility to your research. Take a look at what others have done in your field; find a piece of work you respect and try to emulate the basic skeleton of the paper. Good luck.