A Review of Reviewing

A REVIEW OF REVIEWING

The Trade Union of Book Review Editors is a small one, but as a card-carrying member (I fulfil the same function for Psychological Medicine as do Alan and Sidney for the Journal and Ros for the Psychiatric Bulletin) the first thing to say is how much I sympathise with your Reviews Editors in their task. The journals and their readers owe them a debt of gratitude for all the work they have done over the years.

Why do we do it? What is the purpose of a review? For publishers it is to obtain publicity and sell copies — I have met publishers who feel there is no such thing as a bad review. For authors it is to receive the recognition and appreciation they feel they deserve for their labours. For some reviewers, as Crown et al point out, it is a first dip in the water of writing.

But what about the person for whom a review is intended — the reader? I feel that a review should inform, entertain and occasionally provoke. A review which simply lists the contents of the book in question and draws attention to the (usually exorbitant) price fails in this duty, being little more than a repetition of the publisher's catalogue. Too often overworked reviewers fall back on clichés such as “ too expensive for the trainee, but should be in every hospital's library”. I doubt if there ever was a golden age when hospitals had libraries which bought books on the basis of reviews — they certainly do not now.

The best reviews, which one encounters in such august publications as The Times Literary Supplement or the New York Review of Books, are often jewels of argument and exposition, essays in their own right. The book (or more often books) is but the starting point of the reviewer's journey: at the end the reader is left wiser than before and is often entertained en route.

Most of us have neither the time nor the skill to aspire to these heights. Sometimes we make it — the ‘Reading About’ section, or the now defunct ‘Books Reconsidered’ feature and ‘Review of Books’ supplement, are reviews that I certainly enjoy and read with pleasure. Anthony Maden's review of Inquiries After Homicide in the November issue of Psychological Medicine and the January 2000 Psychiatric Bulletin is another example of reviewing at its finest. But these are rare — why?

First, unlike the TLS, we do not pay. Second, we are too polite — bad reviews, if done with wit and style, and more readable than good ones. But the most important reason for the generally low quality of scientific and medical reviews is the nature of the beast itself — scientific publication. Books are not very important for us. Unlike our colleagues in the humanities, scientists do not usually communicate by books. Original research is presented in the learned journals, and books count for nothing in the Research Assessment Exercise which dominates the waking and even sleeping hours of academics. Medical and science books sell exceptionally badly, unless they are written by stylists such as Stephen Jay Gould or Matt Ridley, or alternatively have titles such as Know Your Own Food Allergy. For the rest the combination of too many titles each of which sells too few copies means that there is not the time, money or incentive for any to receive editorial attention and improvement. Textbooks for undergraduates are an exception because of their large market, but even if better written, rarely produce good reviews. Much medical publishing — the interminable conference proceedings or edited books — is both unreadable and unreviewable unless one is a master of satire.

What about the future? With the growth of electronic publishing and bookselling, readers and publishers will be coming ever closer together. If I want to find out what is new in the field of schizophrenia, I will be able to access a list of titles with ease. Readers are going to want more ‘added value’ from book reviews, just as electronic publication and PUBMED will force traditional journals to be more than collections of original research papers if they are to survive.

In their piece the editors wonder about ‘evidence-based’ reviews — but anyone who has seen the ‘structured’ book reviews now used by Annals of Internal Medicine will surely reject this idea. I am an aficionado of evidence-based virtually anything, except book reviews. Instead, let us have fewer, but longer reviews. Let us support better those who can write powerful, interesting and provocative reviews — let us even pay them for their trouble. But most of all, please support your local book review editor — it is a thankless task!