Introduction

Most researchers seem often discouraged to write and publish book reviews (Obeng-Odoom 2014), probably due to the reason that book reviews play a role of “an Academic Cinderella” in academia (East 2011). Four points may explain book reviews’ seemingly “second-class citizenship” of scholarly publication (e.g., Nicolaisen 2002; Riley and Spreitzer 1970; Young 1975). First, book reviews may be regarded as the reviewers’ personal opinions rather than scientific contribution (e.g., Sabosik 1988). Accordingly, the scholarliness of book reviews may be challenged (e.g., Nicolaisen 2002). Second, book reviews are most of the time solicited by review editors, and dissimilar to research articles, do not go through the rigorous process of peer reviewing for quality control (Leo 2009; Oinas and Leppälä 2013). Third, probably due to the two foregoing points, book reviews received low citations (East 2011), which in turn may still downplay the role in scientific publication. Fourth, more practically, researchers do not benefit from writing and publishing book reviews for their academic assessment and career development (e.g., Obeng-Odoom 2014; Oinas and Leppälä 2013). For example, Obeng-Odoom (2014) states that book reviews are off the list of “weighted research publications” (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations 2008), which obviously serves as an evidence for the seemingly less “weighted” role that book reviews play for researchers’ career development.

However, the significance or scholarliness of book reviews cannot be downplayed only because most researchers are reluctant to write them (Obeng-Odoom 2014; Oinas and Leppälä 2013; Nicolaisen 2002). In fact, many researchers argue for the crucial roles that book reviews play. For example, book reviews are serving “informative”, “evaluative”, and “reflective” purposes, and they are forums for serious discussion or debate on novel ideas (e.g., East 2011; Oinas and Leppälä 2013; Spink et al. 1998). In addition, Obeng-Odoom (2014) also argues for the benefits that researchers may gain while writing book reviews, such as boosting their own research, developing their skills of evaluation, and building reputation in an area. Some scholars also offer suggestions on how to write book reviews (e.g., Hartley 2006, 2010) and investigate the style change of book reviews as a genre across time (Hartley et al. 2016).

In the area of bibliometrics, many studies exclude book reviews from the data to be used in the studies (e.g., Leydesdorff and Wagner 2009; Liu et al. 2015), though some research include book reviews for the data analysis (e.g., Lei and Liao 2017). Such a case may also imply that many researchers in the area do not accept book reviews as significant academic publications. Probably as a result of it, book reviews have not attracted enough attention by researchers in the area, and bibliometric analysis on book reviews is scarce and under-explored as Liu et al. (2016) note.

Of the bibliometric studies on book reviews, Schubert et al. (1984) may be the first study that conducts bibliometric analysis on book reviews. The study finds that most book reviewers hold positive attitudes towards the books that they review, possibly due to the “visibility” or non-anonymity nature of the comments. The study also finds that the reviewers’ attitudes towards a book are not correlated with the number of citations to the book.

Other studies on book reviews from the bibliometric perspective include Spink et al. (1998), a survey on researchers’ attitudes and criteria of book reviews; Nicolaisen (2002) which proposes a bibliometric approach to examining the scholarliness of book reviews; Zuccala and Van Leeuwen (2011) that investigates the rates of both citations and co-citations of books with book reviews; and Gorraiz et al. (2014) which finds that books with book reviews would increase its number of citations.

Liu et al. (2016) is the study that is most pertinent to and motivates the present work. Liu et al. (2016) examines the publication of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals from 2006 to 2015 in terms of the number of publications, research areas, and contributing countries. As for the number of publications, the study finds that the absolute numbers of book reviews published in SCI-Expanded journals across the examined period are stable, and they are less than 10% of that published in SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals. In addition, the relative numbers of book reviews published in the three indices have gone down across the time. Concerning the research areas, most book reviews are published in areas of arts and humanities and social sciences, such as history and religion. As for the contributing countries, the work finds that developed countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada are leading and major contributors of book reviews. One of the most interesting point the authors find is that China, serving as a rising academic power (e.g., Liu et al. 2015; Zhou and Leydesdorff 2006), and Japan, another traditional academic power, have not contributed much to book reviews. Thus, the authors suggest that we explore the reasons why researchers from China and Japan publish a limited number of book reviews, which seems incomparable to their roles as academic powers.

The present study is primarily motivated by Liu et al.’s (2016) findings that China and Japan published a disproportionally low number of book reviews as well as their suggestion to examine China and Japan’s contributions to book review. In this study, we intend to situate Liu et al.’s (2016) suggestion in a broader context. That is, we would explore the publications of book reviews by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India. We choose these five countries since USA, Germany, and Japan are traditional powerhouses of scientific research while China and India are newly emerging economies and academic powers (e.g., Liu et al. 2015; Zhou and Leydesdorff 2006). In addition, besides Liu et al.’s (2016) suggestion of Japan, we also choose Germany as our examined country because both Germany and Japan are non-native English speaking countries.

The present study is also motivated by our concerns of contributing our book reviews to SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals. As researchers in the area of applied linguistics, we have witnessed Chinese linguists’ increasing interest in or “enthusiasm” of contributing book reviews as well as research articles to SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals. Therefore, it would be of interest to explore, in this study, what the most productive research areas, besides linguistics, for book reviews by researchers from China as well as those from other countries such as USA, Germany, Japan, and India.

Based on the motivations, the present study aims to address the following research questions:

  1. 1.

    What are the annual outputs of book reviews by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India from 2006 to 2015?

  2. 2.

    What are the research areas of book reviews by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India from 2006 to 2015?

  3. 3.

    How are the book reviews cited?

Methods

We used the Web of Science database to gain the data concerning the publications of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals from 2006 to 2015 by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India. Three points should be noted here. First, we used the Web of Science database for the reason that it includes approximately 12,000 influential peer-reviewed SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals, which are widely used in bibliometric studies (e.g., Lei and Liao 2017; Liu et al. 2016; Yu et al. 2016). Second, we followed Liu et al. (2016) and chose the time span from 2006 to 2015, as such we could make more reasonable comparison between our findings with those of Liu et al. (2016). Third, as previously discussed, we examined book reviews from the aforementioned five countries for the reason that USA, Germany, and Japan are traditional scientific powerhouses while China and India are emerging academic powers.

Three steps were employed for the data retrieval. First, we searched the “Address” as “USA”, “Germany”, “Japan”, “China”, and “India” from SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI databases. We set the time span as from 2006 to 2015. Then, we refined the “Document Types” to “Book review” from the preliminary results. Last, we followed Liu et al. (2016) and employed the online analysing function of the Web of Science database to obtain the results of annual outputs and research areas. We searched and gained the data from the Web of Science portal at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China on March 10, 2017.

Concerning the citations of book reviews, we used the Citation Report of the Web of Science as the statistics of the citations the book reviews received.

Findings

In this section, we report the findings in terms of annual outputs, research areas, and citations of book reviews.

Annual outputs in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

The absolute and relative annual outputs in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals are described in Table 1 and Fig. 1. Following Liu et al. (2016), the relative annual outputs were calculated by dividing the number of book reviews in a certain year by the number of all publications in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI databases in that year.

Table 1 Annual outputs in SCI-Expanded, SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals
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Fig. 1
figure 1

Absolute annual outputs of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

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The results showed that the absolute annual outputs of book reviews by researchers from Germany, Japan, China, and India increased from 2006 to 2015, while that by researchers from USA remained stable (See Table 1 and Fig. 1a). Results of simple linear regression indicated that the absolute annual outputs from Germany, Japan, China, and India increased significantly [Germany: F(1, 8) = 5.77, p = .04; Japan: F(1, 8) = 15.48, p = .00; China: F(1, 8) = 461.4, p = .00; India: F(1, 8) = 8.72, p = .02], and that from USA did not change significantly [USA: F(1, 8) = 0.08, p = .78].

Two points are note-worthy here. First, USA and Germany were much more productive in terms of book review publication than the other three countries were. Second, of the four countries that gained significant increase in publications of book reviews (see Fig. 1b), it seemed that China has gained quick and steady increase (we will get back to the issue in the “Discussion” section).

Concerning the relative annual outputs of book reviews, it is obvious that the relative outputs by researchers from USA, Germany, and India significantly decreased [USA: F(1, 8) = 31.95, p = .00; Germany: F(1, 8) = 6.99, p = .03; India: F(1, 8) = 13.45, p = .01] and those from Japan and China significantly increased [Japan: F(1, 8) = 12.84, p = .01; China: F(1, 8) = 6.82, p = .03] (see Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

Relative annual outputs of book reviews in SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

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It should be noted that the average number of China’s output in the examined decade was much lower than those of other countries while the number of total outputs of China ranked second only to USA. The outputs discussed here included publications both in the disciplines of science and technology and in those of social science and arts and humanities. However, our hypothesis is that book reviews are particularly published in journals in disciplines of social science and arts and humanities, which would be evidenced by findings of Liu et al. (2016) and by those presented in the section of research areas in the present study. Thus, it would be of interest and significance to explore only publications in disciplines of social science and arts and humanities. Such findings would offer a clearer picture of publications of book reviews from the five countries.

Annual outputs in SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals

The method to retrieve the data for this section was much similar to that described in the “Methods” section. The only difference was that we excluded the SCI-Expanded database, and searched only the SSCI and A&HCI databases. We did not calculate the SSCI and A&HCI databases separately for the reason that many journals were both listed in the SSCI and A&HCI databases. For example, we did a quick calculation and found that 383 of 1780 A&HCI journals are also included in the SSCI list. That is, separate calculations of the two databases would report overlapped and inaccurate results.

The findings of the annual outputs of the five countries in SSCI and A&HCI journals are described in Table 2. The results were similar to those reported in the previous section. That is, the absolute annual outputs of book reviews by researchers from Germany, Japan, China, and India increased from 2006 to 2015, while that by researchers from USA remained stable (see Table 2 and Fig. 3). Results of simple linear regression indicated that the absolute annual outputs from Germany, Japan, China, and India increased significantly [Germany: F(1, 8) = 6.04, p = .04; Japan: F(1, 8) = 15.07, p = .00; China: F(1, 8) = 462.70, p = .00; India: F(1, 8) = 9.02, p = .02], and that from USA did not change significantly [USA: F(1, 8) = 0.08, p = .79]. In addition, similar to the findings reported in the previous section, it was found that USA and Germany published more book reviews than the other three countries were. However, dissimilar to the previous findings, China was behind Germany in terms of the output of book reviews and the total output in social science and arts and humanities, though its output surpassed those of Japan and India and kept on increasing quickly.

Table 2 Annual outputs in SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals
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Fig. 3
figure 3

Absolute annual outputs of book reviews in SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

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The relative annual outputs of book reviews revealed that those of USA, Germany, China, and India decreased significantly [USA: F(1, 8) = 331.60, p = .00; Germany: F(1, 8) = 39.63, p = .00; China: F(1, 8) = 12.55, p = .01; India: F(1, 8) = 71.40, p = .00], that of Japan remained stable [F(1, 8) = 4.33, p = .07] (see Fig. 4). The results seemed to be closely related with the findings concerning the absolute annual outputs and the total outputs of the countries. That is, although the absolute annual outputs of the USA, Germany, China, and India increased, their total output also increased quickly. As a result, their relative annual outputs decreased. In contrast, although absolute annual outputs of Japan increased, its total output did not increase that quickly, which led to its steadiness of the relative annual output (see Fig. 5).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Relative annual outputs of book reviews in SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

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Fig. 5
figure 5

Absolute annual outputs of book reviews versus total outputs in SSCI, and A&HCI indexed journals

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Research areas

The top 10 research areas of book reviews in terms of total number of book review publications by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India are listed in Table 3. One general finding from it was that the top research areas of the five countries were all ones in social science and arts and humanities, such as History, Literature, and Area studies. That is, none of research areas in science and technology was included in the top 10 research areas in these countries. The finding provided evidence to both Liu et al.’s (2016) finding and our hypothesis that book reviews are mostly published in social science and arts and humanities.

Table 3 Top 10 research areas of book reviews of the five countries
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Another finding of interest here was that most of the research areas were included in the top lists of book review publications for more than one country. To be specific, a total of 19 areas were found in the top lists, 14 of which were listed for at least two countries. Areas such as History, Business economics, Literature, Government law, Area studies, Sociology, Religion, Linguistics, Asian studies, and Arts humanities other topics were found in the top lists of at least three countries. Such a finding may indicate that some areas attracts researchers from a diversity of countries. More importantly, it may show that these areas particularly welcome book reviews.

Citations book reviews received

Based on the Citation Report from the Web of Science, the average citations per book review by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and IndiaFootnote 1 were 0.03, 0.04, 0.03, 0.05, and 0.03. For comparison purposes, we calculated the mean score of the 2015 impact factors of all SCI-Expanded and SSCI journals, which was 1.99, and that of only SSCI journals was 1.32. The results showed that the citations that the book reviews received were relatively low, which might serve as another reason for book reviews’ status of “Academic Cinderella” in academia (East 2011) or “second-class citizenship” (e.g., Nicolaisen 2002; Riley and Spreitzer 1970; Young 1975).

Discussion

In this research, we studied the publication tendency of book reviews by researchers from USA, Germany, Japan, China, and India, and the top research areas of book review publications in these countries. Based on the results of the study, several points should be noted. First, the absolute outputs of book reviews in both the SCI-Expanded, SSCI, and A&HCI journals and the SSCI and A&HCI journals by researchers from Germany, Japan, China, and India showed a general increasing tendency across the examined span of 10 years. Interestingly, the relative outputs of book reviews in the SSCI and A&HCI journals by researchers from Germany, China, and India decreased (that from Japan remained unchanged). The proportion of book reviews in the total output of publications in social science and arts and humanities might indicate that though more book reviews by the researchers from these countries were published, their contributions of other publications such as articles also increased, or increased more rapidly. Another possible explanation, as one of the reviewers correctly pointed out, is that the total publication in the academia might also have gone up in the examined decade, which led to the increase in the numbers of both book reviews and total outputs of these countries. Since it may be a little off the point of this study, it may be of interest in future to explore the proportion of publications from these countries in the total publication of the world in the examined period.

Second, China’s achievement seemed particularly remarkable amongst these countries since China was the only one that experienced significant but steady growth and, more importantly, China surpassed those of Japan, a traditional scientific powerhouse, in 2010 in terms of book review output and kept on increasing quickly from then on. China’s rise as a research power, i.e. China has surpassed traditional scientific powers such as Japan, has already been recognised by many studies such as Leydesdorff (2005), Zhou and Leydesdorff (2006), Leydesdorff and Wagner (2009), and Moiwo and Tao (2013). Such a case may be explained by China’s rapid development in economy (Barboza 2010), and accordingly its increase of investment in scientific research (e.g., Yip and McKern 2014). As Lei and Liao (2017) optimistically predict, China may sustain or accelerate its “exponential growth” (Leydesdorff and Wagner 2009) after its initiation of a series of programmes to boost its development of world-class universities and disciplines (State Council 2015; Zhang et al. 2013). Thus, it is understandable that China has surpassed Japan in terms of both book reviews and total publications in SCI-Expanded, SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals.

Third, the number of book reviews contributed by researchers from Japan, China, and India is much lower than researchers from traditional scientific powers such as USA and Germany. Liu et al. (2016) suggested two reasons for it. The first reason may be that researchers from the countries have contributed only a limited part of the total publications in SSCI and A&HCI indexed journals. The second reason might be that the postgraduate students (as well as professional researchers, we believe) have not received enough training on how to write book reviews. Thus, they should be taught and encouraged to write book reviews, since books are still important communicative tools in academia.

While we accept Liu et al.’s (2016) aforementioned suggestions, we may discuss it from the following three points (we owe parts of the following discussion to the reviewers). First, the research systems may be much different in the examined countries. Compared with traditional powerhouses such as the USA and Germany, upcoming countries such as China and India, albeit their enormously increased investment in scientific research (e.g., Leydesdorff and Wagner 2009; Yip and McKern 2014), have invested much less in social science and arts and humanities than in science and technology. For example, the spending in basic research in China only explains 5% of its R&D investment, while its most funding goes to technology (van Noorden 2016). This may explain why China’s and India’s total publications and publications of book review in social science and arts and humanities are much lower than those in the USA and Germany. Second, one obvious but significant nature of book reviews, different from other document types of academic journals such as research articles and letters, is that some journals only accept solicited book reviews. That is, the book review editors would solicit or invite candidate reviewers of books they receive from publishing houses or they select to write reviews (Obeng-Odoom 2014; Oinas and Leppälä 2013). Chances are that the book review editors may invite candidate reviewers that are experts in some themes or thematic areas. Thus, more outputs of book reviews from USA and Germany may provide evidence to their research power, particularly in social science and arts and humanities, in comparison to countries such as Japan, China, and India. The foregoing argument could also be supported by the much larger total outputs in social science and arts and humanities from USA and Germany. Last, some journals also accept submissions of book reviews from researchers without invitation. In such cases, the publications of book reviews may indicate individual researchers’ interest in or attention to certain books they are reviewing. As one of the reviewers pointed out, it may need a study in future to explore the proportion of solicited or freely submitted book reviews for more accurate explanations of the findings.

Fourth, although book reviews have been less weighted than other types of publications such as research articles and letters (e.g., Obeng-Odoom 2014) for various reasons such as its relatively low citations as found in the present study, its importance could not be downplayed in some areas where books play a very important role of knowledge communication (Liu et al. 2016). It would be particularly true when we consider areas such as History, as evidenced in the present study, where the proportion of book reviews were very high (from more than one quarter in China to more than three quarters in USA).

Last, two points need to be discussed concerning the database issue. The first point is that some may argue for the use of other databases such as Google Scholar to retrieve the data. While the Web of Science may not include as many journals in social science and arts and humanities as Google Scholar does, it has its merit in that it includes only “quality” journals. In contrast, although Google Scholar includes much more journals, the journals may not be all “quality” ones. In addition, Google Scholar does not provide any portal as user-friendly as the Web of Science is to download the information for bibliometric analysis purposes. Another point concerning the database issue is that the Web of Science includes mostly English journals, while there must exist journals that publish book reviews in other languages. To address the two points, research is needed to examine the publication of book reviews with other databases that include more journals and journals published in other languages.