Do citations have to be put in context?
Every paragraph has a purpose. The answer to your question depends on the purpose of your paragraph.

Clarity in academic writing is always good, but you should weigh whether being explicit is clarifying or obscuring the important points. "For recent reviews see {cite bunch of reviews}," may be fine if you want to direct the reader's attention to the existence of those reviews. Perhaps you're doing a metareview, or for some other reason want to track development of the literature.

But the terser version is cleaner if the existence of reviews is tangential to your point. The reader can investigate further if she wishes--hopefully the titles of your cited works make their purpose clear, so she's not digging around to figure out what they're about!--but she can also breeze past the citations to your main point. Extreme concision in citations is widely accepted. I've seen citations to my work (broadly, in interdisciplinary social science) where I was not entirely sure why the authors thought it was relevant!

So what is your paragraph trying to accomplish?