Passing in Review

    One of the many jobs I've had in a long and varied work life - and one of the two that came closest to my actual dream job of being a librarian - was a stint as an abstractor/editor for a company that created online databases and a range of other library service products. As an abstractor, it was my job to take a stack of magazines, select articles, read the articles, and create an abstract for each of them that would allow a researcher to decide if a given article really spoke to the topic he/she was working on. The abstracts were synopses, not reviews - but the selection process, though theoretically guided by such quality-neutral criteria as length of article and type of article, became a sort of de facto review.

    Now Jeffrey Beall, a metadata librarian at the University of Colorado (Denver), is suggesting that the long-standing practice of librarians to create readers' advisories and reviews of books should be expanded to include shorter works, including magazine and journal articles, short stories, essays and individual poems. Beall maintains that the constantly increasing number of scholarly articles being published - he notes an estimate by University of Manchester professor Douglas Kell that five scientific papers are published every minute - argues greatly for the same sort of pre-screening process applied to books be applied to these shorter works.

    Leaving aside, for the moment, the very real concern of where to find time to do the necessary reading, I can almost hear librarians thinking something along the lines of, "But I don't know anything about (and here you can fill in the blank), how can I tell if an article is worth reading?" 

    From personal experience, I can tell you that the weak articles sort themselves out from the strong ones, regardless of the reviewer's level of knowledge. To give an example, I once had to abstract an article on the use of beta splines. To this day, I have no idea what a spline is, let alone a beta spline - but the article's emphasis on certain aspects of the usage of beta splines allowed me to ferret out the main idea and craft a useful abstract.

    To be sure, creating a review - forming an actual opinion on a work and stating that opinion in print - adds layers to the process. But even when the scientific detail of an article is beyond one's comprehension, the organization of the writing can be evaluated, the number of resources cited can be noted, and the overall reputation of the journal in which the article appears can be taken into account.

    Beall goes on to suggest that review journals such as Booklist ought to add sections for journal article reviews, separated by discipline, as are the book reviews. Anything indexed, he maintains, can be reviewed. Perhaps not surprising for someone dealing in metadata, Beall even suggests that reviews could be reviewed - although, personally, I think that may be drawing the paradigm out a bit too far.

And now you've just read my review of Jeffrey Beall's article "Let's Review Everything".

References:
Beall, J. (2010). Let's review everything. American Libraries, 41(5), 23.