Current status of biomedical book reviewing: Part III. Duplication patterns in biomedical book reviewing.

This is the third part of a comprehensive, quantitative study of biomedical book reviewing. The data base of the total project was built from statistics of 3,347 reviews of 2,067 biomedical books appearing in all 1970 issues of fifty-four reviewing journals. This part of the study explores the duplication patterns in book reviewing among these media. It is found that 35.17% (727 books) of the 2,067 titles were reviewed more than once in 1970, these titles accounting for 2,007 of the total of 3,347 reviews. For the most part, reviews of the most frequently reviewed titles appeared in such journals as British Medical Journal, Annals of Internal Medicine, Lancet, Journal of the American Medical Association, and New England Journal of Medicine. These five journals covered 93.53% of the 727 books reviewed more than once in 1970.