Page 154 - How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper, 8th Edition 8th Edition

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Chapter 27
How to Write a Book Review

Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill.
—Barbara W. Tuchman

Scientific Books

Books are important in all professions, but they are especially important in the sciences. That is because the basic unit
of scientific communication, the primary research paper, is short (typically five to eight printed pages in most fields)
and narrowly specific. Therefore, to provide a general overview of a significant slice of science, writers of scientific
books organize and synthesize the reported knowledge in a field into a much larger, more meaningful package. In
other words, new scientific knowledge is made meaningful by sorting and sifting the bits and pieces to provide a
larger picture. Thus, the individual plants and flowers, and even the weeds, become a landscape.

Scientific, technical, and medical books are of many types. In broad categories, they can be considered as
monographs, reference books, textbooks, and trade books. Because there are significant differences among these four
types, a reviewer should understand the distinctions.

Monographs. Monographs are the books most used by scientists. Monographs are written by scientists for scientists.
They are specialized and detailed. In form, they are often the equivalent of a long review article. Some monographs
are written by single authors; most are written by multiple authors. If a large number of authors are contributing to a

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monograph, there will be one or more editors who assign the individual topics and then edit the contributions to form
a well-integrated volume. (This is the theory but not always the practice.) Such a monograph can be put together "by
mail"; alternatively, a conference is called, papers are read, and a resultant volume contains the "proceedings."

As a publisher of long if not good standing, I now express a pet peeve. If, as a book reviewer, you want to comment
about "the outrageously high price charged by the publisher," know what you are talking about. (That, by the way, is a
good general rule for all aspects of book reviewing.) My point is this: Some reviewers have a simplistic notion about
book prices; some even use a simplistic formula, saying perhaps that any book priced at less than 10 cents a printed
page is O.K. but that a price higher than 10 cents a page "is gouging the scientific community." The fact of the matter
is that the prices of books do and must vary widely; the variance depends primarily not on the size of the book but on
the size of the audience. A book with potential sales of 10,000 or more copies can be priced modestly; a book with
potential sales of 1,000 to 2,000 copies must carry a high price, if the publisher is to stay in business. Thus, a price of
10 cents a page (say $20 for a 200-page book) might be insanely low for a specialized monograph.
Reference Books. Because science produces prolific data, science publishers produce a wide variety of compilations of
data. Most of these are of the handbook variety. Some of the larger fields also have their own encyclopedias and
dictionaries. Bibliographies were once a common type of reference book, but relatively few are being produced today.
As online bibliographic searching has become common, printed bibliographies in most fields have become obsolete.
Reference books are expensive to produce. Most are produced by commercial publishers, who design the product and
employ scientists as consultants to ensure the accuracy of the product. The published reference works, particularly the
multivolume works, are likely to be expensive. From the reviewer's point of view, the essential considerations are the
usefulness and the accuracy of the data assembled in the work.

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