universidade federal de santa catarina pós-graduação em letras ...

128The intention here is to find out more about book reviewing practices and aboutwho these reviewers are. In order to answer these questions, all texts were coded interms of (1) language used in the title, (2) country in which the book was published, (3)reviewers’ affiliation to off-center (e.g., Africa and South-America) or mainstreamcountries (e.g., Europe and North-America), (4) reviewers’ career status, i.e., Junior orSenior scholars.In order to check the fourth item concerning each reviewer’s career length andprior academic production (e.g., books, articles), two sources were consulted. One of thesources was the University of Michigan computerized interlibrary consultation system(MIRLYN), which includes an on-line catalogue of approximately 6.75 million volumes.The other source was the Source Index for the Social Sciences Citation Index (Garfield,1989) and the Science Citation Index (Garfield, 1991). The year of publication of thefirst book or article by the reviewer as indicated in these Indices and in the MIRLYNsystem was assumed to be the beginning of the reviewer’s publication career. Prioracademic production was classified in terms of the different entries for the reviewers’names in the Indices (papers) and in the MIRLYN system (books).The criteria to consider a reviewer as a senior scholar were: 1) professionalsworking for more than 15 years, with at least one book published or 2) professionalsworking for more than 8 years, with more than 2 published papers per year. All otherreviewers that did not meet at least one of these criteria were classified as Juniorscholars (including also those scholars whose production could not be traced in theinformation system).