Book reviews in academic journals

I thought that economists might be interested in my thoughts on the new book by Angrist and Pischke and, more generally, on the different perspectives that statisticians and economists have on causal inference. So I wrote them up as a short document and asked an econometrician friend where to send it. He said that the Journal of Economic Literature does book reviews so I sent it there. They returned it to me with kind words on my review but the note: “The JEL has avoided reviewing textbooks, focusing instead on research monographs. The review makes fine points about the coverage in this textbook, but neither the book nor the review are attempting to advance the state of the art.”

Fair enough. So where to send the review. I asked some colleagues and they all agreed that JEL is the only economics journal that reviews books. So I guess econ textbooks just don’t get reviewed!

This surprised me, given that book reviews appear in several top statistical journals, including the Journal of the American Statistical Association, the American Statistician, Biometrics, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Statistics in Medicine, and Technometrics. There are also lots of places that review books in political science.

I’m surprised that there’s only one place for book reviews for economists.

9 thoughts on “Book reviews in academic journals

  1. I think it is because economists only emphasize on journal publication, but not book publications. Do you know about other natural sciences, such as physics?

  2. I thought of this, but statistics is even more article-centered than economics, I think–and, as I noted above, there are lots of top statistics journals that review books.

  3. Your colleagues are not completetly right about that. It is true that the JEL specializes in book reviews and that top generalist economic journals do not publish much of them (if at all), but most field journals do publish book reviews (a quick search on Econlit will confirm that the book review activity is indeed alive in economics). I do not know about textbook reviews, though.

  4. One radical suggestion is Stata Journal (given the book uses some Stata examples. From Stata:

    "Book reviews will concentrate on books about Stata or that contain examples using Stata. We will also carry occasional reviews of books that may be of interest or value to many readers. We welcome suggestions of books to review."

    I think the Journal of Economics Education also has reviews of textbooks, but my most economists you want to reach are more likely to read the Stata Journal than JEE. Another journal that has book reviews and is read by a fair number of applied economists (esp. those at policy schools and those interested in program evaluation) is JPAM, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

  5. You need to broaden your colleagues or at least your source of information. Without doing any research I can think of four economics journals who do book reviews. The Economic Journal, Economic Record, Journal of Applied Econometrics and Econometric Reviews.

  6. I second Denzil. A few econometrics journals publish (text)book reviews and those would be the best targets for your write-up.

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