Book Reviews

THERE IS CURRENTLY A MORATORIUM ON BOOK REVIEW. WE WILL NOT BE ACCEPTING ANY NEW BOOK REVIEW SUBMISSIONS.

We welcome the submission of book reviews to The Qualitative Report (TQR)! If you are interested in having a book review published in TQR, please follow these steps:

When selecting a book to review for TQR, keep in mind that we publish reviews of books published in the last three years addressing both qualitative research methodology and reports of qualitative studies, as well as books addressing epistemological, philosophical, and theoretical issues pertaining to qualitative research.

Please check our list of books we have available for review below. If you would like to review one of these books, please fill out the form at the bottom of this page.  If you accept the book from us we expect you to send us your review within 60 to 75 days of your receipt of the book. If you are unable to fulfill this commitment we ask that you return the book to TQR.

In order to determine whether or not we have not already published a review of the book you are considering reviewing, please look up a book’s title or author or search through the TQR Article Index page.

If we have not published a review of the book you are considering, we will be happy to consider your review. If we have published a review of the book, but you feel that you would offer an alternative perspective to the one included in the published review, we will consider your review; in this case, however, we ask you to write your review as a response to the published review.

We are especially interested in publishing reviews which reflect a degree of creativity. We think merely retelling the contents of each chapter or summarizing a general affection for the text on the part of the reviewer does not seem to contribute much new or of value to the reader or to the book’s author, so we like to see other ways a reviewer can create a book review that brings new insights to the understanding of the original work. To get an idea of different ways to carry out and report a book review we suggest you read TQR Editor-in-Chief Dr. Ronald Chenail’s essay, “How to Read and Review a Book like a Qualitative Researcher.”

When constructing your review, please include the following elements:

• A title that clearly identifies the subject of your review
• An abstract of 120 words or less
• A list of three to five key words included in the review
• The body of your review, in which you provide a context for your review, in which you present the main focus and intent of the book, identify strengths and weaknesses, and suggest potential readership for the book and possible applications.
• If there are online resources associated with the book provided by the publisher, we also ask you to describe these items and provide a link to those resources.
• References formatted in compliance with the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
• An author’s note of 120 words or less, in which you describe your current position(s) and ways in which readers can contact you.

When you are ready to submit your book review, please send it to TQR at tqr@nova.edu. We will notify you whether we are able to use the review and whether any revision is required. Following publication, we will send your review to the book’s publisher for further distribution.

Please note that Scopus does not cover book reviews. The reason for this is that they do not represent literature, and the publishers in whose journals they appear often regarded them as full text. As a full text article, Scopus would only be able to display the title of the book review, which is often identical to the actual book causing confusion to Scopus users. Lastly, book reviews are not often cited in research literature. As an example of this the average citation per item for the “Journal of Academic Librarianship” drops by 50% (2.13 to 1.12) when book reviews are included.

If you have any questions, please send an email to tqr@nova.edu.