A review of active matter reviews

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the extensive and diverse research landscape of active matter by analyzing over 600 review articles, helping researchers navigate the field's various subdisciplines.

Contribution

It offers a meta-review that synthesizes existing reviews on active matter, clarifying the field's scope and subfields for easier literature exploration.

Findings

Over 600 review articles on active matter identified.

The field spans theoretical, biological, medical, and artificial systems.

Provides a structured overview of active matter research areas.

Abstract

In the past years, the amount of research on active matter has grown extremely rapidly, a fact that is reflected in particular by the existence of more than 600 review articles on this topic. Moreover, the field has become very diverse, ranging from theoretical studies of the statistical mechanics of active particles to applied work on medical applications of microrobots and from biological systems to artificial swimmers. This makes it very difficult to get an overview over the field as a whole. Here, we provide such an overview in the form of a metareview article that surveys the existing review articles on active matter. Thereby, this article provides an introduction to the various subdisciplines of active matter science and constitutes a useful starting point for finding literature about a specific topic.