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
