By publishing reviews of scholarly books, journal editors can amplify and extend intellectual conversations within their fields. This essay offers suggestions for journal editors who wish either to consider publishing book reviews or to improve the value of the book reviews they publish. The advice—focusing on enabling, encouraging, and acknowledging influential, transformative scholarly book reviews—is intended to help scholarly book reviews come closer to achieving their potential as intellectual contributions of their own.
Steven E. Gump (Wed,) studied this question.