Book review
Encyclopedia
A book review is a form of literary criticism in which a book is analyzed based on content, style, and merit. A book review could be a primary source
Primary source
Primary source is a term used in a number of disciplines to describe source material that is closest to the person, information, period, or idea being studied....

 opinion piece, summary review or scholarly review. It is often carried out in periodicals, as school work, or on the internet. Reviews are also often published in magazines and newspapers. Its length may vary from a single paragraph to a substantial essay
Essay
An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

. Such a review
Review
A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product or a service, such as a movie , video game, musical composition , book ; a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show...

 often contains evaluations of the book on the basis of personal taste. Reviewers, in literary periodicals, often 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
Non-fiction
Non-fiction is the form of any narrative, account, or other communicative work whose assertions and descriptions are understood to be fact...

 work. At the other end of the spectrum, some book reviews resemble simple plot summaries.

History

The earliest known "book" (or scroll) reviews were produced in ancient Athens
Classical Athens
The city of Athens during the classical period of Ancient Greece was a notable polis of Attica, Greece, leading the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. Athenian democracy was established in 508 BC under Cleisthenes following the tyranny of Hippias...

 circa 140 BC. Reviews were first published in periodicals in 1665, when the Journal des sçavans
Journal des sçavans
The Journal des sçavans , founded by Denis de Sallo, was the earliest academic journal published in Europe, that from the beginning also carried a proportion of material that would not now be considered scientific, such as obituaries of famous men, church history, and legal reports...

was started in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

.

As a teaching tool

A book review
Review
A review is an evaluation of a publication, a product or a service, such as a movie , video game, musical composition , book ; a piece of hardware like a car, home appliance, or computer; or an event or performance, such as a live music concert, a play, musical theater show or dance show...

 is assigned to secondary and post-secondary students to help them to develop analytical skills. First, the reviewer has to summarize the content, regardless of the type of novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

, a historical or critical book. In the subsequent narration, the goal of the book reviewer is to discuss the content of the book and provide analysis
Analysis
Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle , though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.The word is...

 of what he or she had read, and deduce if the author managed to reveal the core, whether he or she kept to the thesis or properly achieved the purpose of the book. The final thing the reviewer has to do is to speculate on the topic himself or herself. The book reviewer should also undertake through their own research to discuss the theme, assess the author's ability to express and explore this theme, and provide an opinion of the novel.

The determination of the book review is to communicate to the reader's mind the ideas and sensations the reviewer experienced while researching the content. In this way, the reader knows what the author sought to transmit, or what the reviewer experienced while reading. The reviewer, then, takes three roles: reporter, in informing the third party of the events; analyst, in making judgments based on experience; and sideline observer, in pretending to act as the reader should by expressing their own opinion, desires and expectations.

Textbooks

Unlike the language in a monograph, that in a textbook must not be technical and jargon must be avoided. The reader will be a student, not a peer of the scientist who wrote the book. Technical terms will be used, of course, but each should be carefully defined at first use. The function of the book reviewer is to determine whether the subject of the text is treated clearly, in a way that is likely to enable students to grasp and to appreciate the knowledge presented. The textbook reviewer has one additional responsibility: If other texts on the same subject exist--which is usually the case--the reviewer should provide appropriate comparisons.

As professional work

Book reviews require special skills and oblige the reviewer with precise responsibilities. The professional reviewer does not just have to read and scrutinize the text, but to realize concealed, implied meaning the author obviously had dropped hints about. Skilled book reviewers' explanations make the reader feel confident in their perception of the book or change it entirely.
The reviewer must also state the main points of the reviewed book. While some aspects are less meaningful, others have to be marked out as prerogative issues. The task is even more complicated as the writer could unintentionally imply the idea the reviewer of the book can notice.

Then the book reviewer has to decide upon the author's point's validity. The reviewer has to be the judge and say, “Did the writer persuade the audience, or was his/her evidence insufficient and weak?” The reviewer here makes a judgment on the adequacy of the book topic to the content. The book review also evaluates the expertise of the content's authenticity. By comparing the reviewed book to other materials in the given category, the reviewer work implies potential danger for those writers who admit plagiarism
Plagiarism
Plagiarism is defined in dictionaries as the "wrongful appropriation," "close imitation," or "purloining and publication" of another author's "language, thoughts, ideas, or expressions," and the representation of them as one's own original work, but the notion remains problematic with nebulous...

. If the reviewer finds the book authentic and, perhaps, unique, the points and attitudes of the reviewer are discussed.
rsrn should maintain.

Finding reviews

There are many special journals devoted to book reviews and they are indexed in special databases such as Book Review Index
Book Review Index
Book Review Index is an index of book reviews and literary criticism, found in leading academic, popular, and professional periodicals. It has been published since 1965. For most of its history it has been owned by Gale and part of the Thomson family of information businesses.-Publication...

, but many more book reviews can be found in newspaper databases and in scholarly databases such as Arts and Humanities Citation Index
Arts and Humanities Citation Index
The Arts & Humanities Citation Index , also known as Arts & Humanities Search is a citation index, with abstracting and indexing for more than 1,300 arts and humanities journals, and coverage of disciplines that includes social and natural science journals. Part of this database is derived from...

, Social Sciences Citation Index
Social Sciences Citation Index
Social Sciences Citation Index is an interdisciplinary citation index product of Thomson Reuters' Healthcare & Science division. It was developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index....

and discipline specific databases. Some book reviews are available online.

Problems

Principally, book reviews are good sources for evaluating the quality of books. Sometimes, however, the amount and content of book reviews have been considered problematic. Katz (1985-1986) found that there are too few critical book reviews. This is also documented by Novick (1988) in the field of history. Typically, book reviews in scholarly journals are of a much higher quality than those in newspapers. Nielsen (2009) proposes a theoretical and practical framework for scholarly or academic reviews of dictionaries that is intended to improve the quality of reviews in terms of academic standards.

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: 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: http://www.db.dk/jni/Articles/Nicolaisen(2002c).htm

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 Press.

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.

External links

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