Book Title Cover

GUIDELINES FOR BOOKS REVIEWS 

A guide for authors

Thank you for agreeing to write a book review for Insight Turkey. The following guidelines are aimed at helping book review authors as to form, content, and the editorial process. Please feel free to contact us if you have additional questions or concerns.

NOTE: To request a book for review, please send an email to bookreview@insightturkey.com.

In this email please attach your CV together with the filled and signed Book Review Request Form. Please click here to download the form.

Review Head:

The heading will appear at the top of your review and it must be written in the format below:
Title of Book(s) Being Reviewed
by Author, translated by Translator [if applicable] Publisher, Year, Price [paper or cloth], ISBN 978## [no dashes]
reviewed by Your Name Surname - Your Affiliation

Sample:

A Tale of Four Augusts: Obama’s Syria Policy
By Kılıç Buğra Kanat
İstanbul: SETA Publications, 2016, 297 pages, $30,00, ISBN: 9786054023790.
Reviewed by Rıfat Öncel, Middle East Technical University

Delivery: 

Please email your review to bookreview@insightturkey.com  as an attached Word document (.doc) or text file (.rtf). Please do not send the text of the review in the body of your email, as this can cause problems with formatting.

Content:

Before beginning the review, consider the following questions:

What should the reader of the review know? What does he or she need to be told?

Book reviews should be addressed to a broad readership of scholars from diverse disciplinary perspectives. We hope that the Insight Turkey book review section will serve as a dynamic forum in which a wide variety of concerns and changes are discussed in depth through the consideration of new and thought-provoking work in the fields of Turkish foreign policy, history, politics, international relations, and other relevant areas.

The recommended content is as follows: (i) One-third of the review should summarize the books under review; (ii) two-thirds of the review should focus on a critical evaluation and analysis of the book(s) under review. While Insight Turkey book review editor recommends reviewers to bring in their own normative judgments and informed critiques of the books under review, they are also interested in methodological, theoretical, and comparative analysis of the books under review. A note at the end about the intended audience of the reviewed books is also recommended.

Some things that reviewers should avoid: quotations that do not clearly illustrate a specific critical issue; long quotations; references to works or authors not generally known to most readers; anecdotes or details about the reviewers themselves, unless these are directly relevant to the argument of the review; biographical details about the author that do not bear directly on the book.

Style:

Word count: 900-1100 for book reviews and 2500-3200 for review articles.
Please conform your review to the following text formatting:
   1. Do not use indent for the paragraphs.
   2. Single-spaced throughout the document.
   3. All quotations from the book under review should be followed by the relevant page reference in parentheses.
   4. Book titles mentioned in the review should be italicized and book chapters should be written in quotation marks.
   5. If a reference is given to a publication other than the reviewed book, add it as an endnote.

Process:

Your review will be edited by the Insight Turkey editorial team. If accepted, it will then be emailed to you as a Word document, for you to correct and return. Afterward, it will be sent to the copy editor for proofreading.
Please keep in mind that acceptance for publication is conditional on approval and editing by the book review editor. The book review editor reserve the right to ask that a book be returned if the review is considered unsatisfactory.
You will be contacted by email when the review is posted online and will have an opportunity to check the work for typographical errors before we send the newsletter announcing the new issue.
* There may be additional editing after that in order to fit the review into the space available.