The scholarliness of published peer reviews: a bibliometric study of book reviews in selected social science fields

Book reviews serve a number of important functions in various academic settings, necessitating a high level of scholarship. A scholarly book review describes and characterizes not only the book in question, but also the topic with which it is dealing. It examines whether the book under review provides new knowledge to the field, and how it relates to established theories. Scholarly book reviews consequently reflect-their scholarly qualifications by containing appropriate discussions of related literature. The paper proposes a bibliometric technique for determining the scholarliness of book reviews. The proposed technique rests on central insights gained from related research on scholarly communication, strategic research materials, and genre analysis. Inclusion of bibliographic references is revealed to be a key indicator of scholarship and is therefore implemented as the decisive factor in the following case study of book reviews in six selected social science fields.