International
Cognitive
Linguistics
Association

Editorial Policy for book reviews on the ICLA pages

1. General guidelines

Book reviews should consist of 500 to 1000 words. The editors expect reviews to adequately summarize the main ideas of the book, assess its quality, and note its contribution to cognitive linguistics. Reviewers are asked to formulate any negative opinions in a professional, non-abusive manner.

For any book review accepted for publication, the editors reserve the right to change punctuation, phrasing, and wording for purposes of conforming to standard English written conventions. Please proofread and spell-check your submission thoroughly. Reviewers whose native language is not English should ask a native speaker to proofread their writings before submission.

2. Formatting

Please follow the format of our other reviews, cf. Review of Goldberg (2006).

Each book review should begin with the title and author information of the book, and name and affiliation of the review author.

Regarding references, please observe the following guidelines adapted from the Cognitive Linguistics Stylesheet.

References are cited in the text by giving the name of the author/editor, year of publication, and the page reference. The author's name appears inside the parentheses of the reference if it is parenthetical in the containing sentence (example a. below), otherwise not (example b.).
a. "identified as force dynamics (Talmy 2003 Vol I: 163)."
b. "Langacker (2004b: 67) observes that..."

The reference section should contain all works referred to in the text and only those. They must be listed fully in alphabetical order of author/editor, with complete bibliographical details (including city and publisher). Journal and book titles must be given in full. They will appear in italics on the ICLA Book Reviews site. Page references should be given for articles in books and journals.

Please spell out the first names of the authors in the references, rather than giving only first initials. For special symbols or phonetic fonts, an IPA font should be used. Correspond with the Book Review Editor to make sure your intended characters are properly represented.

3. Submitting

Submissions must be e-mailed as a Word or RTF attachment (NOT Word Perfect, and not PDF) to hilpert AT icsi.berkeley.edu and kemmer AT rice.edu . If special symbols or phonetic fonts are used, provide an additional PDF file. The book author should also receive these files at this point, so that possible misrepresentations in the review can be eliminated early on.

4. Timing

Book reviews should be completed within three months of receiving the book. Book reviews will be administered one at a time.

5. Exclusive commitment

Reviewers agree not to publish a review of the same book elsewhere.

6. Ethical considerations

Reviewers should not review books which they have refereed for a publisher, or to which they have contributed. Reviewers should not have personal relations to the book author that would stand in the way of an objective assessment of the work.

Updated 9 March 2008

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