Book Reviews as a Selection Tool for Librarians

This paper is concerned with the possible source of bias in book reviews. Most scientific journals attempt to select the most publishable aiticles by getting more than one reviewer to examine a paper on various specified criteria. The same is not true of book reviews. Furthermore, various self-presentational artifacts often occur which may lead reviewers to being more negative than they otherwise might be. As a consequence, one often learns from book reviews more about the reviewer than the book. It is precisely because book reviews are useful as a source of peer commentary feedback to authors, and of course a selection tool for librarians, that suggestions are made as to how to improve them.