Professionalism: The Need for Standards

The flood of professional publications, which presents an information crisis of the first order, has now begun to produce a second-order crisis in its evaluation. Most professions are inundated with new literature. As a result, only a few books get reviewed, and those that do are often reviewed poorly. According to a political scientist who recently kept score on reviews of his latest book, the malady has several aspects: (1) Books whose subject matter suit them for review in certain journals are not reviewed in those but in other journals that are much less pertinent to the topic; (2) The assignments of individual reviewers to books is haphazard and results in incompetent reviews; (3) The “non-review” prevails: reviewers peddle their own intellectual wares instead of discussing the contents of the book in question and (4) Outright dishonesty occurs: distortion and misquotation shade off into plagiarism. These are strong assertions whose general applicability may not always hold; however, the issue of reviewer competency and the quality of reviews is worth more detailed consideration.