Book reviews in Spanish scholarly journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities: analysis of production between 2007 and 2009

The goal of this work is to analyse the production of reviews published between 2007 and 2009 in the scholarly journals in the Social Sciences and Humanities contained in the ISOC database. Different aspects were analysed: time pattern, journals, authorship and author affiliation. Also examined were the books reviewed, by publication type, language, authorship, publisher and time lag between the books' publication and the appearance of the reviews. The results concerning the reviews show a constant reduction in their production and a large number concentrated in the humanities. Authors are mostly Spaniards and university lecturers, who publish alone and have a very low level of productivity. There is also a high level of endogamy among those authors who are members of editorial boards. The results concerning the reviewed books reveal that few titles were reviewed more than once, there are a large number of monographs, mostly in Spanish, and there is a long time lag between a book's publication and the appearance of its review.