Abstract :
Reading and writing book reviews play 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 issues with members of the editorial panels
of the
British Journal of Educational Technology
. A questionnaire was used to
determine: (1) how often these people read and wrote book reviews in general;
(2) how useful they found them; and (3) what features they thought were
important in book reviews. Thirty sets of responses were obtained (15 from
each sex). Most respondents reported reading between one and five book
reviews a month and writing between three and four a year. Overall, there was
high agreement in what they thought were the important features of book
reviews, but there were also wide individual differences. Men reported that
book reviews were more useful than did women. The agreement obtained
among the respondents supports the notion that book reviews can be viewed
as an academic genre with measurable contents. This has implications for how
they are written and how people might be taught to write them better.
