How do I reference a book review… in the Cranfield Author-date style?

If you’ve come across book reviews when searching the journal databases, you may have wondered what they are and whether you should cite them.

In essence, a book review provides a summary and a critical evaluation of a book. As well as analysing the content of the book, book reviews can provide comparisons to other key works in your subject. Reviews should not be substituted for reading the actual book, however instead be used to help understand the basic principles and arguments of the book.

If you have used a book review in your work, you will need to cite and reference it correctly. Here’s how to do this in the Cranfield Author-date style…

References:

We’ll look first at how to create a bibliographic reference for the end of your work. Here is what you need:

• Reviewer(s) of the book (Surname, Initials)
• (Year of publication)
• ‘Title of the review’ (if applicable)
• Review of… (Title of the work reviewed – in italics)
• Author/director/editor of work being reviewed
• Publication details (title in italics, volume, (issue), page numbers)

So an example reference for a book review would look like this:

Al Ariss, A. (2011) Review of Global Careers, by Michael Dickmann and Yehuda Baruch. Human Resource Management, 50 (5), pp. 685-688.

In-text citations:

Where you make reference to this item in your text, follow the normal ‘name and date’ conventions and simply follow any mention with (Al Ariss, 2011) or a variation thereon.

Any questions?

As always, if you have any questions about referencing or citations, please contact MIRC or the Kings Norton Library.

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