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Robert Lew, Herbert Andreas Welker. O Uso de dicionários: Panorama geral das pesquisas empíricas, International Journal of Lexicography, Volume 20, Issue 4, December 2007, Pages 401–403, https://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecm029
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The work under review presents a comprehensive overview of the existing empirical research on dictionary use. The main body of the book offers summaries of 220 individual studies, an average summary amounting to about a page and half, and thus quite substantial. The summaries have all been written by the author, and most are based on his first-hand reading of the original works. A minority of the summaries (I have counted 40 of these) are based on second-hand reports by one or more other authors, and these sources are carefully recorded and documented. The summaries themselves are factually accurate, clear, and give just the information that a researcher or student might need to help them in fleshing out a review of the literature, or in planning original research. Of course, there will always be circumstances where there is no substitute for reading the original text in full, but for all other situations Welker offers the best possible alternative that I can imagine. Much richer than a typical abstract, such a summary will be sufficient in all those numerous cases where the writer wants to cite any of the studies included but the findings are not central to the theme of their paper. It should also be pointed out that quite a substantial proportion of the studies treated in Welker's work are hard to obtain in the first place, which adds to the practical value of the book. Further, not all students and researchers will have sufficient knowledge of foreign languages to be able to read the original reports in entirety.
