Reciprocity in Book Reviewing among American, British and Canadian Academics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Books and their reviews have been historically central to knowledge dissemination in the social sciences and humanities. Despite this perceive importance, few studies have assessed the relative importance of these document types in the dissemination of knowledge. This paper aims at better understanding the place of book reviews in the scholarly communication system and to shed light--through the analysis of books on Canada, United Kingdom and United States and their reviewers--on the international circulation of ideas in the social sciences and humanities. Based on 1,675,999 book reviews indexed in the Social Science Citation Index and Arts and Humanities Citation Index over the 1975-2016 period, our results show that book reviews are decreasing in importance in all disciplines—especially those where books have historically been peripheral. We also observe a high rate of homophily between reviewers and reviewed books, with researchers being primarily interested in the books that have been written by someone from their own country. Hence, despite the now widely held assumptions of the globalization of science, social science and humanities remains a highly localized activity.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".