BOOK REVIEWING IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.

The book review is an important form of professional communication, if for no reason other than the scholar's difficulty in coping with the knowledge explosion. About one-third of the pages of the journals "American Sociological Review," the "American Journal of Sociology," and "Social Forces," were devoted to book reviews in 1968. Despite such prominence, social scientists pay little attention to the substantive or organizational aspects of book reviewing. Recognizing its importance, this article discusses book reviewing in the social sciences and the editorial procedures for administering the book-review section of a journal. The article is based upon a review of relevant literature in the humanities, information sciences, and natural and social sciences, as upon the responses to a twelve-item, open-ended questionnaire sent to current and recent review editors of the three aforementioned journals. The whole apparatus of book reviewing functions more on the basis of tradition and imitation than on the strength of contemporary agreements. It would appear that book reviews are the second class citizens of scientific literature. This can be seen in the difficulties editors have in getting members of the discipline to accept and complete book reviewing assignments, and it is evident in the fact that few reviews offer more than a simple abstract of the book. One is struck by the seeming lack of normative structure and social organization surrounding the entire reviewing process.