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95exactly what is <strong>de</strong>sired for the genre, they should look at BRs in the journal in question.This advice <strong>de</strong>monstrates the lack of one specific set of general gui<strong>de</strong>lines that holds forall disciplines, while also showing Steiner’s awareness that each discipline/publicationhas its own idiosyncrasies.In another att<strong>em</strong>pt at generalizing the information organization of aca<strong>de</strong>mic BRs, or ‘book reviews oncont<strong>em</strong>porary thought’, Drewry (1966:62) states that the <strong>de</strong>scription of the structure of the BRs is similarto that of a news story, that is, an inverted pyramid, as indicated in Figure 3.1.Figure 3-1 Overall organization of the aca<strong>de</strong>mic BR according to Drewry (1966:62)The inverted pyramid analogy represents a text organization in which the mostimportant information comes first and is followed by the less important <strong>de</strong>tails.However, only a <strong>de</strong>tailed text analysis can prove if this is in<strong>de</strong>ed a productive mo<strong>de</strong>l ofthe flow of information in the genre. In fact, as will be argued in Chapter 5, the analogydoes not se<strong>em</strong> a very pertinent one.3.2.8 Reasons for journals not/to carry reviewsUsually a small number of journals account for a large number of bookreviews either for monetary reasons (reviews do not bring in divi<strong>de</strong>nds as inthe case of ch<strong>em</strong>istry articles) or for prestige reasons (as in economics wherebooks are not as prestigious anymore, losing grounds for research articles).In her study on BRs, Chen (1976) discovered that only a limited number ofjournals actually carry the genre. As a result, many BRs are released long after the bookhas been published and thus are of little use to non-expert rea<strong>de</strong>rs such as librarians whoneed information on current literature in the disciplines (ibid.:24). Thus, most of the

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