> I am looking for references to recent corpus and genre research into book reviews in scholarly journals. All pointers welcome.
I don't know how recent is recent, but probably the most influential work on the genre structure of book reviews is Ken Hyland's chapter on the subject in Disciplinary Discourses (2000). Françoise Salager-Mayer and Ana Moreno are other authors who come to mind. They do not employ computational techniques, as far as I know, but Hyland's original approach was based on what boiled down to a paper-based corpus analysis of evaluation.
Best,
Alon