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Reading and writing book reviews across the disciplines

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  • James Hartley

Abstract

Reading and writing book reviews for learned journals plays an important part in academic life but little is known about how academics carry out these tasks. The aim of this research was to explore these activities with academics from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences. An electronic questionnaire was used to ascertain (a) how often the respondents read and wrote book reviews, (b) how useful they found them, and (c) what features they thought important in book reviews. Fifty‐two academics in the arts, 53 in the social sciences, and 51 in the sciences replied. There were few disciplinary differences. Most respondents reported reading between one and five book reviews a month and writing between one and two a year. There was high overall agreement between what the respondents thought were important features of book reviews, but there were also wide individual differences between them. This agreement across the disciplines supports the notion that book reviews can be seen as an academic genre with measurable features. This has implications for how they are written, and how authors might be taught to write them better. A potential checklist for authors is suggested.

Suggested Citation

  • James Hartley, 2006. "Reading and writing book reviews across the disciplines," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 57(9), pages 1194-1207, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:57:y:2006:i:9:p:1194-1207
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.20399
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    Cited by:

    1. Weishu Liu & Yishan Ding & Mengdi Gu, 2017. "Book reviews in academic journals: patterns and dynamics," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 110(1), pages 355-364, January.
    2. Juan Gorraiz & Christian Gumpenberger & Philip J. Purnell, 2014. "The power of book reviews: a simple and transparent enhancement approach for book citation indexes," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 98(2), pages 841-852, February.
    3. Elea Giménez-Toledo & Jorge Mañana-Rodríguez & Tim C. E. Engels & Peter Ingwersen & Janne Pölönen & Gunnar Sivertsen & Frederik T. Verleysen & Alesia A. Zuccala, 2016. "Taking scholarly books into account: current developments in five European countries," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 107(2), pages 685-699, May.
    4. Alesia Zuccala & Thed van Leeuwen, 2011. "Book reviews in humanities research evaluations," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 62(10), pages 1979-1991, October.
    5. James Hartley & John Cowan & Cynthia Deeson & Peter Thomas, 2016. "Book reviews in time," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 109(3), pages 2123-2128, December.
    6. Yaoyu Wei & Weiwei Fan, 2018. "A study of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI journals by researchers from five countries: 2006–2015," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 115(2), pages 637-654, May.
    7. Anton Oleinik & Svetlana Kirdina-Chandler & Irina Popova & Tatyana Shatalova, 2017. "On academic reading: citation patterns and beyond," Scientometrics, Springer;Akadémiai Kiadó, vol. 113(1), pages 417-435, October.

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