The criticize a published book requires mastery of the subject, analysis and thorough evaluation. Revealing the positive and negative parts of the study with their arguments can make us believe that a criticism has been made. Writing down what authors are in a multi-part book and what their titles are is not a book review. This is just an endeavor equivalent to making a list of "index". Also, the other problem is this: While writing reviews for books with multiple authors to exclude some parts without any selection criteria. What do you think about these issues?
The quality of book reviews varies, from just a summary of the book to an extended and educated review of the field and of the book (essay review). If the book contains many contributions by different authors, it will not be possible to review all of them. In this case, one may just give some examples or highlights, clearly indicating that the number of reviewed papers is not comprehensive. - By the way, I regret that ResearchGate does not have a category "Book reviews" with a link to the reviewed book. I had to put my own book reviews under "Article" (in journals) and "Chapter" (in yearbooks).
Dear Nesrin Kalyoncu ,
I used to review books when I was younger and I think I did a very poor job at it! I would say that doing a good book review is generally much harder than reviewing a journal article. Apart from the fact they are much longer, you need to be much more familiar with the theories and methods of the field. Book reviews will also vary according to their purpose - textbooks are probably easier to review by teaching staff as they will have a feeling about their utility for their target audience.
Interesting question. I think reviewing books is quite difficult as you need to have comprehensively read the whole text to effectively critically analyse it. I think it's helpful to review it for a particular audience - e.g. if I am reviewing an evaluation book for publication in an evaluation journal, then the book's target audience in that case is a bunch of evaluators. I'm not sure that it would make too much of a difference to me whether the book was an edited volume or not - although I would probably provide more chapter by chapter analysis rather than overall analysis.
Here is a technical question concerning book reviews: https://www.researchgate.net/post/Are_you_finding_that_publishers_are_not_giving_out_review_copies_any_more
Dear Wolfgang R. Dick , Peter Samuels and Leanne M. Kelly
Thank you very much for your contributions.
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