Article Types / Book Review

Book reviews typically evaluate recently written works. They offer a brief description of the text's key points and often provide a short appraisal of the work's strengths and weaknesses. A good book review includes a definitive opinion, shares your own personal experience, and offers a recommendation on what type of person would like the book. The IJVLMS welcomes book reviews that fall within the aims and scope of the journal and comprise four main parts: an Introduction, a Statement, a Body, and a Conclusion.

The IJVLMS generally accepts book reviews of 1000-1500 words (including references), with 1 figure or table and 4-8 references.

Keywords (3-6 keywords based on the MeSH Browser) should be provided for indexing and online searches. Authors are encouraged to browse through articles on similar topics to find appropriate keywords.

Introduction: Full details of the book should be provided at the beginning of the article. Describe the book cover and title or any subtitles, the author(s)’ information, the genre or type of book, the publisher, the year of publishing, and the edition. State the purpose of the book, including the author’s major findings, and state the purpose of your review, including the reason(s) for introducing the book.

 

Statement: Write a brief description of the book, briefly introduce the main points of the body, and avoid mentioning any opinions in this part. A book review can be written using certain approaches, such as descriptive, analytical, and critical, or even two or more approaches. The reviewer should explicitly inform readers how he/she has interpreted the book.

 

Body: In the body of your book review, you will support your statement with reference to specific examples from the text. The review should focus on the content of the book and its characters, including the novel aspects of the book and other aspects that would be attractive to the readers, rather than critique the author(s). You can use some quotations from the author’s opinion, summarize the quotations in your own words, and mention your own point-of-view of the quotations. Remember to keep every point included in its own paragraph and discuss the importance of issues you have raised based on the approach or approaches mentioned in the statement.

 

Conclusion: Briefly summarize all the strengths and weaknesses of the book, summarize the explanations, and finish with a concluding sentence. In this part, consider the following questions:

 

  • What have you learned from reviewing the book?
  • What is your overall assessment of the book’s importance?
  • Who might benefit most from reading it?
  • How can future researchers build on this book?
  • Does the book make space for new kinds of research within its field?

The conclusion is your last chance to add analysis to your book review. Therefore, be sure to address the book’s overall significance and offer readers an overall evaluation of the text.

Footnotes

 

  • Acknowledgments: Recognize the individuals, institutes, or organizations that have contributed to the preparation of the article but do not meet the criteria for authorship. Contributions may include academic, technical, financial, or personal assistance in preparing the articles. The authors must indicate the contributors' affiliations and their specific contributions. The use of AI for writing assistance should be reported in the acknowledgment section.
  • Authors’ Contribution: Authors specify their contributions to the research process and writing of the manuscript. They indicate their contributions to different aspects of a project, such as conceptualization, study design, data acquisition, statistical analysis, preparing the manuscript, reviewing, etc. Please provide the names of authors by initials rather than full names.
  • Conflict of Interest: Authors must disclose any financial and non-financial competing interests in advance of the review process. They need to declare if they received financial payment for the research, or if they have close relationships with people or entities that could inappropriately influence (bias) their study. Non-financial interests may include the disclosure of any personal, political, religious, ideological, academic, and intellectual interests that might bias a study. General institutional support for an author’s time on the work should be distinguished from direct overall funding of the work. An appropriate funding statement might be: “The study was funded by A; Dr. F’s time on the work was supported by B.” If there are no competing interests, add the following statement: “The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest regarding the publication of this paper”.
  • Funding/Support: All sources of financial and material support for the research work are acknowledged in this section. Authors should identify the roles of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design, collection, analysis, interpretation of data, and in preparing the manuscript. Please include the name(s) of the funding organization(s) along with the grant number(s). If no funding has been provided for the research, please add the following statement: "This research did not receive any outside funding or support".
  • Availability of Data and Materials: A Data Availability Statement should be included in all book reviews. Your data availability statement should describe how the data supporting the results reported in your paper can be accessed. With a data statement, an author can provide information about the data presented in an article and provide a reason if data is not available to access. Click HERE to see a template for different kinds of statements.
  • References conform to the style outlined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), also referred to as the “Vancouver” style. References in the text should be numbered sequentially and placed in parentheses. 

The following general instructions must be observed when citing references. Moreover, IJVLMS has its own EndNote style. Authors are advised to prepare their references based on this style and add the file to the style folder of their Endnote in program files. This style is available HERE.

  • Referencing AI-generated material as the primary source is not acceptable.
  • References should be made to published articles rather than to abstracts whenever possible.

In-text citation:

  • References in the text should be numbered sequentially and placed in parentheses.
  • For in-text citation of a work with more than one author, use ‘et al.’ after the first author.
  • When citing several references for the same statement, use a hyphen to link the first and last numbers that are inclusive. For instance, (4, 5, 6, 7) must be abbreviated to (4-7). Use commas where the numbers are not consecutive in a multiple citation, e.g. (8, 13).

  Reference List:

  • The reference list appears at the end of the paper and is titled ‘References’.
  • References are listed in numerical order, and in the same order, they are cited in the text.
  • The reference list should include all and only those references that appear in the text.
  • If a work has more than 6 authors, please list the first six authors, followed by ‘et al.’
  • The number of references from theses, conference papers, and websites should not exceed 5 percent of the total references.
  • Please note that the journal titles in the reference list should be abbreviated in the style used in the NLM Catalog.
  • At least 80% of the references must have article identifiers, such as digital object identifier (DOI) and PubMed PMID (or PubMed Central PMCID). Please add these identifiers at the end of your references when available. You can visit the following link to search for DOIs and PMIDs of articles: http://www.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery. EndNote software is highly recommended for writing and managing references.

Listed below are sample references for different types of work. For further details and examples, authors may consult Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd edition).

 

Journal Article:

Almarzooq ZI, Lopes M, Kochar A. Virtual Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Disruptive Technology in Graduate Medical Education. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2020;75(20):2635-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jacc.2020.04.015. PubMed PMID: 32304797; PubMed Central PMCID: PMCPMC7159871.

Complete Book:

Secker J. Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment: A Guide for Librarians. Edition (if not first) - ed. Oxford: Elsevier Science; 2004.

Chapter in an Edited Book:

Fournier H, Kop R, Molyneaux H. New personal learning ecosystems: a decade of research in review. In: Becnel K, editor. Emerging technologies in virtual learning environments. Harshey: IGI Global; 2019. p. 1-19.

Thesis:

Kaplan SJ. Postgraduate students’ professionalism [dissertation]. St. Louis (MO): Washington University; 2021. (DOI is required)

Conference Paper:

Kimura J, Shibasaki H, editors. Recent advances in clinical neurophysiology. Proceedings of the 10th International Congress of EMG and Clinical Neurophysiology; 1995 Oct 15‐19; Kyoto, Japan. Amsterdam (NL): Elsevier; 1996. (DOI is required)

Website: 

Meyer D. Virtual learning is the way forward for educators. Elmhurst: Elmhurst University; 2020 Oct 8. [Cited 2021 Nov 10]. Available from: https://www.elmhurst.edu/blog/virtual-learning/.