[rerx]

It is called a review article. Such a paper is meant to summarize the current understanding in an ongoing field of research. It is useful for researches who are not (yet) intimately familiar with that field. They might want to add contributions of their own in that area or they might find that they can transfer some ideas to their own fields of research. For people working in that area themselves a review paper is also useful to find citations and discussions of recent research papers.