Help, I can't figure out what the right method is for evaluating books on their own

by [deleted]

Hello askhistorians subreddit, not knowing this forum until recently I asked some scholars by email how a non-expert can evaluate the academic quality of a book, I received different answers is what I understood is:

  • Publisher: There is very important research published without peer-review and very bad things published with peer-review.
  • The author's credentials: a respected scholar might publish a mediocre work while a self-taught one might publish a masterpiece.
  • Scholarly reviews: a reviewer might have an axe to grind or out of haste not have read the whole book
  • Citations: The book may be cited frequently for criticism not necessarily because it is seen as useful.
  • Read the book by yourself and make your own judgement: I was answered even so but for a non-expert this is impossible because the author of the book could have done cherry picking, not really consulted the sources cited or used them in a biased way.

So I can't figure out how I should proceed, what do you recommend?

mimicofmodes

What you should conclude from this list you've written showing the issues with different methods of evaluation is that there is no hard-and-fast, "objective" rule of thumb to be uncovered. The only way to proceed is to either:

a) Start learning about a particular subject, so that you can evaluate books in that topic by judging whether or not they appear to be making their points. Yes, they may cherry-pick sources or examples, but the point is that you learn to spot this by becoming familiar with the literature. This is obviously problematic because becoming an expert takes a lot of time.

b) Ask someone who is already an expert in a particular topic to assist you. This is much simpler, although then you have to contend with the perspective of the scholar, which runs into some of the issues you give in your list.

Now, this being said, there are some issues with your list. While the points you make are sound, university press books are more likely to be of "academic quality" than popular press ones, reputable scholars in a field are more likely to produce good work than not, and so on. These criteria are particularly relevant if you use them together: for instance, if a book is frequently cited in contemporary scholarly literature AND it's from a scholarly press AND it has good reviews, it's probably good. If it's not frequently referred to, self-published, and the reviews are bad, it's probably not a good book. You cannot take these as absolute truths, but they certainly do represent the best way to evaluate short of developing expertise or consulting an expert. There is no such thing as absolute certainty or objective truth in any field, and you should not be reading books with the mindset that they are either perfectly true or else worthless.

Can I ask why you have asked this question here so many times with multiple accounts, especially if you are "not interested in historical disciplines"? You are skating on the edge of a ban because it almost appears to be trolling. We are not going to allow you to keep asking and asking.