First of all: when you review vocabulary, you always have to shuffle the set of cards before you go through them. Since our brain is so good at remembering patterns, otherwise you're likely to include the sequence of words as a main clue in your learning. This means that they're dramatically less accessible outside of this sequence (i.e. whenever you actually need to use them).
Going through the cards, start with recognizing the words (passive knowledge), i.e. first look through them on the side of the foreign language, since this is the easier task. Think of the translation or translations, and then turn it over to check. Then go through the other side. If you really need to actively know the spelling, then writing down any particularly hairy ones might be a good idea, since it's easy to kid yourself on this point.
That said: The main thing with vocabulary learning is to get the amount of repetition right. There's no sense in churning through dozens of words that you know perfectly well, only to then miss that one word that has been eluding you, yet again.
So the first thing is to sort out the ones that you know during your repetitions, so that you go through a progressively smaller stack.
The second thing is that you can't have just one big stack of "previously known" words, since this quickly gets to entirely unmanageable sizes. You need to establish some spacings here.
For me, personally, I need a lot of initial repetitions, so I'd have a stack for repetition on the next day. The known ones here then go into a stack for repetition three days later, and from there into one for a week, then a month later. From there on you can just divide them into small sets, possibly ones that are thematically related (that's the good pattern recognition in this context), and go through them when you have some time at hand.
Any words that you don't remember during any of the repetitions go back into the current stack, and then have to pass through the entire series of stacks again.
PS: About the content of the cards: Since we remember patterns and connections, it is often better to not just have single words on there, but a typical phrase or phrases in which the word occurs. This makes things easier to remember, and additionally provides a way to train entire chunks of language. This first of all improves your active use, since you can then recall the chunk instead of having to construct it as you speak. Additionally it help with other aspects of language such as tenses and word order.
No specific references here, but this is based on teaching English as a foreign language for several years, and reflects mainstream opinion in the field.
