Review Guidelines

Western Folklore reviews of single works are generally 500 to 900 words long; combined reviews of two or more titles may run to 1,200 words. The due date for a single review is two months.

We often don’t know how much experience a reviewer has at reviewing, so if you need advice and suggestions as your review progresses, please stay in touch with the review editor, Afsane Rezaei, but cutting and pasting the following address into your email program: reviews@westernfolklore.org. This is especially true if you need to extend your deadline beyond the initial two months. We are willing to work with reviewers on idea development, drafts, and anything else related to the review.

Review guidelines: With due respect to reviewer intentions, reviewers are asked to consider the following areas (not necessarily all of these, not necessarily only these, and not necessarily in this order):

    • audience
    • purpose
    • how well purpose is achieved
    • use of scholarship
    • comparison with similar works in the field
    • uses to which this work might be put
    • the place this work may eventually assume in the scholarly canon
    • authorial style or attitude
    • copyediting
    • design

A reviewer may be attracted to or repelled by a title under review, and you are welcome to express (tastefully) your personal response to it, and also to provide personal information if the inclusion of such information will serve to situate the reviewer vis-à-vis the subject matter of the work being reviewed.

All reviews must provide the following information about the item under review:

    • Title
    • Author(s) or editor(s)
    • Place(s) of publication
    • Publisher(s)
    • Year of publication (if a reprint, include original year in parentheses)
    • Number of roman- and arabic-numeral pages (see example below)
    • The presence of the following features,as applicable:
      • foreword
      • acknowledgments
      • introduction
      • photographs
      • illustrations
      • maps
      • notes
      • bibliography
      • index
    • Price
    • Binding (hardbound or paper)

NB: Except for title and author, enclose all remaining items in a single set of parentheses.

Here’s a sample review heading. Note that the second and succeeding lines are indented:

Eskimo Drawings. Edited by Suzi Jones. (Anchorage: Anchorage Museum of History and Art, 2004. Pp. ix + 208, foreword, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, map, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95 paper.)

At the end, your name goes flush right in all CAPITALS, followed by the name of your institution flush right in italics, then the name of your city flush right in italics:

SIMON POLINDER
Siskiyou Academy of Forensic Folklore
Weed, California

If you have cited other works in the review, add a Works Cited list after the signature block.

Please submit reviews in either WordPerfect or Microsoft Word format, double-spaced throughout, with standard margins, left-justification, and no pagination. Paste everything into an e-mail, attach the document, and transmit the whole to the review editor, Afsane Rezaei, at reviews@westernfolklore.org. Please include a CV and/or brief biographical statement about yourself with your request to interview a text. Please note that we only accept reviews in electronic format.

The list below provides titles available for review in Western Folklore. If you are interested in reviewing a work that is not on the list, please contact the review editor that address. Reviewers who wish to cover two or more related titles in a single review may write a combined review. Be sure to provide author, title, and publisher so that the editor can find the book you want to review. Any works you review are of course yours to keep.