Peter McMahan and Daniel McFarland, in a just-published American Sociological Review article:
By curating the published research in an area, [literature] reviews highlight certain connections between publications while obscuring others, dramatically simplifying a domain of knowledge. They focus scholarly attention around a few key publications and the relations between them at the expense of the broad majority of the research in a domain. Upon inclusion in a review article, the seminal research in a domain is apt to become forgotten, replaced by work that drew connections between existing ideas rather than generating new ones. This suggests the substance of scientific progression may be located somewhere between revolutionary shifts in paradigms of thought at one extreme and the ordinary science of cumulative advancement at the other. The synthetic work that is foundational to scientific discovery is an ongoing process of redefined frames imposed through micro-erasure. This continual, destructive restructuring of discourse constitutes the churning substrate on which significant swaths of knowledge are created.
Fascinating: The pedestrian, even thankless work of the literature review is—in its quiet way—setting the scholarly agenda.