Crisis of the genre: book reviews in studies of scholarly communication
This review essay is based on the results of the project “Criteria of Science and Efficiency in Humanities: History of Professional Conventions in Russia/USSR," supported by the Higher School of Economics 2015 Program for Fundamental Research. I would like to thank Vladimir Pisliakov for his help during work on this manuscript. Book reviews remain one of the main tools of research evaluation. But the status of the genre and its role in the system of scholarly communication have been often put under the question by both professionals in different disciplines and specialists in science studies. In this essay we address these discussions in the context of the cultural history of the humanities. This examination reveals that what are often considered symptoms of the crisis and decay of the genre can be understood as manifestations of the tension between subjectivity and scholarly standards. Awareness of these controversies stimulates researchers, on the one hand, to focus on the communicative nature of scholarship and, on the other hand, to take into account the evolution of the system of scholarly communication.