In our August "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
How does one get to or is asked to do book reviews for top or decent journals? Related question, how do you know when your paper is good enough to be sent to a journal? I'm currently a PhD student.
We've already covered the related question here recently. Particularly if you are a grad student, the safest way to determine whether a paper is publishable is to send it to some faculty mentors and see if they think so! As you progress through your career, you may come to trust your own judgment--but in general, it's still good to send your work to other people (including conferences) to see how others receive it.
In any case, I'd like to consider the question about becoming a book reviewer. Here, another reader gave the following advice, which seems right to me:
I recommend that you contact the journal editor or the journal book review editor. They may ask for a c.v. and information that might indicate that you would be qualified to write a book review for a scholarly journal.
However, I'm curious: do readers think graduate students should even try to review books? Here's why I ask: when I was in graduate school, I knew some students who seemed to think that book reviews were a good use of their time. But, at the time and especially in retrospect, it doesn't seem that way to me. Some of the students I knew who did this only published book reviews, and never got around to actually publishing any articles--and they seemed to think that book reviews would look good on their CV. But this is not the case, right? The chance that a book review is going to help you get a job post-PhD, it seems to me, approximately zero. This isn't to say that book reviews are worth doing. I think they are, and have reviewed a number of books myself. I'm just not sure that it's a good idea for grad students to do them.
What do you all think?
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