Book review

This article is about the use of the term in literary criticism. For the use of the term in academia, see Academic book review. For the cartoon, see Book Revue.

A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review can be a primary source opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. Books can be reviewed for printed periodicals, magazines and newspapers, as school work, or for book web sites on the Internet. A book review's length may vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essays. Such a review may evaluate the book on the basis of personal taste. Reviewers may use the occasion of a book review for a display of learning or to promulgate their own ideas on the topic of a fiction or non-fiction work.

There are a number of journals devoted to book reviews, and reviews are indexed in databases such as Book Review Index and Kirkus Reviews; but many more book reviews can be found in newspaper databases as well as scholarly databases such as Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Social Sciences Citation Index and discipline-specific databases.

See also

• Literary criticism
• Book review magazines
• The New York Review of Books
• London Review of Books
• Amazon.com controversies
• List of online book store
• The Wikiversity course on Writing a Book Review.

Literature

• Chen, C. C. (1976), Biomedical, Scientific and Technical Book Reviewing, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ.
• Ingram, H. & Mills, P. B. (1989), “Reviewing the book reviews”, PS: Political science and Politics, Vol. 22 No. 3, pp. 627–634.
• Katz, Bill (1985–1986). The sunny book review. Technical Services Quarterly, 3(1/2), 17-25
• Lindholm-Romantschuk, Y. (1998). Scholarly book reviewing in the social sciences and humanities. The flow of ideas within and among disciplines. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
• Miranda, E. O. (1996), “On book reviewing”, Journal of Educational Thought, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 191–202.
• Motta-Roth, D. (1998), “Discourse analysis and academic book reviews: a study of text and disciplinary cultures”, in Fortanet, I. (Ed), Genre Studies in English for Academic Purposes, Universitat Jaume, Castelló de la Plana, pp. 29–58.
• Nicolaisen, J. (2002a), “Structure-based interpretation of scholarly book reviews: a new research technique”, Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, pp. 123–135. Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20050818220548/http://www.db.dk/jni/Articles/Abstract_Colis4.htm
• Nicolaisen, J. (2002b). The scholarliness of published peer reviews: A bibliometric study of book reviews in selected social science fields. Research Evaluation, Vol. 11 No. 3, pp. 129–140. Available: https://web.archive.org/web/20060215004706/http://www.db.dk/jni/Articles/Nicolaisen%282002c%29.pdf
• Nielsen, S. (2009), “Reviewing printed and electronic dictionaries: A theoretical and practical framework”, in S. Nielsen/S. Tarp (eds.): Lexicography in the 21st Century. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2009, 23-41.
• Novick, Peter (1988). That noble dream. The "objectivity question" and the American Historical Profession. Cambridge: Cambridge University
• Rampola, Mary Lynn (2010). "Critiques and book reviews", A Pocket Guide to Writing in History, Sixth Edition, pp26–28.
• Riley, L. E. & Spreitzer, E. A. (1970), “Book reviewing in the social sciences“, The American Sociologist, Vol. 5 (November), pp. 358–363.
• Sabosik, P. E. (1988), ”Scholarly reviewing and the role of Choice in the postpublication review process”, Book Research Quarterly, Summer, pp. 10–18.
• Sarton, G. (1960), “Notes on the reviewing of learned books”, Science, Vol. 131 (April 22.), pp. 1182–1187.
• Schubert, A. et al. (1984), ”Quantitative analysis of a visible tip of the peer review iceberg: book reviews in chemistry”, Scientometrics, Vol. 6 No. 6, pp. 433–443.
• Snizek, W. E. & Fuhrman, E. R. (1979), ”Some factors affecting the evaluative content of book reviews in sociology“, The American Sociologist, Vol. 14 (May), pp. 108–114.
• Spink, A., Robins, D. & Schamber, L. (1998), “Use of scholarly book reviews: implications for electronic publishing and scholarly communication”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Vol. 49 No. 4, pp. 364–374.
• Zuccala, A. & van Leeuwen, T. (2011), “Book reviews in humanities research evaluations”, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 62 No. 10, pp. 1979–1991.

External links

• Jane Ciabattari. "The Future of Book Reviews: Critics vs. Amazon Reviewers", The Daily Beast, May 12, 2011.

• Dalhousie University. How to write a book review

• Indiana University, Bloomington. Writing Book Reviews, April, 2004

• Los Angeles Valley College. How to write a book review, February, 2009.

• Purdue Online Writing Lab. Writing a book review, September, 2011.

• Queen's University, Stauffer Library. How to write book reviews, January, 2012.