Bibliographic record
Abstract
The leading journals in the history of sport publish book reviews which are a longstanding and visible feature of the discipline. Indeed, some journals allocate almost as much space to reviews as to scholarly articles. In this article I analyze and evaluate the contributions that book reviews make to the production of knowledge and to building disciplinary and social cohesiveness in the field. Following Pierre Bourdieu, I argue that book reviews play important roles in communities of professional scholars and the way that members position themselves and engage with, relate to, and judge one another. I illustrate this with a case study of 271 book reviews published in Sporting Traditions (the official journal of the Australian Society for Sports History) between 1984 and 1995. The case study yields two particularly relevant conclusions. First, the level of historiographical analysis presented in book reviews is typically minimal with rigorous, detailed and perceptive analyses uncommon. Second, most reviewers adopt mitigating strategies to temper or dilute their criticisms.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.029 | 0.130 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.027 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.004 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".