Academic Book Reviews: Who’s Writing and Citing What in Linguistics?

From narrating to informing to evaluating, academic book reviews are an important contribution to the scholarly world. While the review of a book written for popular consumption can impact its success, the academic book review enables authors and readers to engage in a dialogue concerning the merits of a given work and areas for improvement or expansion through subsequent research. This paper explores over four-thousand book reviews published over an almost thirty-year period on The LINGUIST List, recognizing the reviewing ‘landscape,’ the reviewers’ qualifications, the temporal distance between publication of the book and its review, and the usage of external references.