[OliverJones]

People working in science have employed this process for a long time. Hit your local academic library and look for periodicals called "Annual Review of whatever". More generally, look for review articles and you'll see their work product. Some of these articles are stunningly informative: Feynman's approach works.

Review articles are not the same as meta-analyses; they aren't attempting to evaluate novel hypotheses using existing experimental data, but rather to understand the state of knowledge in a field.

When an academic worker, especially one on the publish-or-perish treadmill, wants to get into a new corner of their field they sit down and write a review article to both get up to speed and to rigorously explore their personal approach. And everybody who cares about the field is better for it.

[azangru]

> People working in science have employed this process for a long time. Hit your local academic library and look for periodicals called "Annual Review of whatever". More generally, look for review articles and you'll see their work product. Some of these articles are stunningly informative: Feynman's approach works.

When you referenced people in science, I thought your example would be a laboratory log. That would indeed be an example of writing about what you learn, while you are learning it. Lab log is also a genre where the intended audience is the author himself, much like a diary. A lab log does not require originality - you may be documenting in it how you performed a certain bench technique that thousands upon thousands of people have done before you.

A review article is a different genre altogether. It has an audience other than the writer. It requires some originality of thought. There is no need to write a review article if a similar one has just been published. Nor would working through a particular protocol from an established book of protocols (aka the docs) be considered worthy of a review article.