A Review Paper and a Technical or Empirical Paper belong to the same genre of writing, i.e. academia but are different concepts to know. Both have their significance in the field of research but it is important to understand the difference between the two, so that they can be handled accordingly.
On one side when a technical or Empirical research paper is based on original research which may be different in its own way, depending upon the topic , a review paper has its foundation on other published articles and it is not a representation of original research. If one talks of the way to approach an empirical paper, authors have to collect and analyse raw data and take up an original study. The crux of the research paper is the analysis and interpretation of this collected data. On the contrary, review articles summarise the existing literature and give their current perspective on the understanding of the topic.
Review articles can be categorised in three ways:
There can be primarily three kinds of review articles:
Narrative Review: It explains the existing knowledge on a topic that is based on any kind of published research that is available on the topic.
Systematic Review: This tries to explore the answer to a specific question which maybe buried in the existing literature on a specific topic.
Meta Analysis: It does a thorough comparative analysis of previously published studies. The key objective mostly is to evaluate the effectiveness of a specific decision to be taken.
Well made review papers form a good repository of scientific literature as they summarise the gist of existing literature which makes it easier for readers to get an idea about the prevailing knowledge without having to read extensive literature individually. Sometimes review papers are also called as survey papers. This is mostly when the writer has reviewed survey related work. A good review paper is the one that is created in a way that it is able to contribute a small amount of knowledge to the existing pool by giving a taxonomy of the work.
The similarity that one can notice between both these kind of papers is the review of literature. However, researchers and authors need to comprehend that in an empirical paper the review of literature helps to identify the research gap and take forward the objectives of the real research from there. Ultimately the paper is based on the real research and literature review just forms a small part of the paper where as in a review paper, it is the main content and the author does not just attempt to find the gap in the existing literature but also give his critical perspective and summarise the existing research for the readers to be able to get it more crisply.
It is difficult to specifically segregate the journal on the parameter of accepting review papers or not. High indexed journals, listed in SCOPUS and SCI prefer research papers over review articles. The main reason being the element of originality and constructive input they add to the existing literature. However, they do accept Review papers, if they are written in a way that they can give an original and critical eye to existing studies and offer direction for future studies. That is why, it is generally more difficult to publish review articles, mainly for the reason it is very challenging and requires great amount of skill as a writer to create originality from already existing content. It is relatively easier to create a good quality original research paper. For a review paper author, one must have the maturity and expertise to create novelty.
If you are thinking in terms of easy publication, original articles are a better choice as compared to review papers. However, ultimately what is imported to remember is that the quality of your research and your presentation of the manuscript are the key determinants on whose grounds your acceptance of research for publication will be decided.
Please include the difference in a table for better understanding