Reviewing academic research in the disciplines: insights into the book review article in English

Reviewing academic research plays a significant role in scholarship, supporting both the manufacture of knowledge and the social cohesiveness of disciplinary communities. It could be argued that among all the activities of the academy what academics mainly do is evaluate. Academics are constantly comparing, contrasting, evaluating, and predicting as routine aspects of their work: it represents the nature of academic discourse itself. This book explores how academics publicly evaluate each others’ work. Focusing on a somewhat neglected review genre in English academic discourse studies – the book review article – this work investigates the main functional and formal features of this genre in a corpus of book review articles from the disciplines of economics, history and linguistics. The work investigates the way reviewers construct disciplinary identity through display of their evaluative commentary, the forms of argumentation they employ, and how they represent themselves and their reviewed authors in their texts. In doing so, it aims as well to establish the consistency and the effects of such disciplinary identity by highlighting differences and similarities in textual behaviour across disciplines.