Finding Book Reviews
There are several approaches you can take to find a review of a particular book, depending on the age of the book and whether you want a scholarly or non-scholarly review. Finding a review of a specific book may prove to be easy or difficult, the main problem being that not every book is reviewed. General interest books are more likely to be reviewed in general interest periodicals, like newspapers or magazines, while scholarly works are more likely to be reviewed in journals for that particular subject. Also, it sometimes takes a while for scholarly reviews to be published. Sometimes they aren't reviewed until a year or more after the book was published.
When using databases, I would type in unique words from the title of the book, the author's last name, and the word review stemmed (to pick up the word review or reviews), or limit to book reviews if you can.
Once you have citations to book review, or if you are looking at the brief records of some full text reviews, note how long the review is before you try to find the article or even click on the link. There are a lot of magazines that produce really short, paragraph-long reviews. Reviews of that length aid book buyers and librarians, but usually don't help you in really evaluating a book. So I would suggest ignoring book reviews from Library Journal, Kirkus, Publisher's Weekly, School Library Journal, and Choice, unless you really only want something a paragraph long. (If you are really just looking for short and sweet reviews, try Amazon.com first. They frequently will have excerpts or the full reviews from the sources mentioned above.)
Suggestions for Finding Article-length Book Reviews
See below for detailed descriptions and search hints of the databases or indexes mentioned.
To access these databases from off-campus, you will be promted for your username and password. This is the same username/password you have set up for your UIS email account. For more information, see Student Mail.
- If your book is a recent (published in the 1990s to present) general interest book, try LexisNexis Academic.
- For a more diverse offering of book reviews (scholarly & non-scholarly, not always full-text), try Academic Search Premier or Expanded Academic ASAP
- If your book is a recent scholarly work (1987-present), try Web of Science.
- If your book is an older scholarly work, try Book Review Index (a print index) or some other database or index that covers the same subject, i.e. America: History & Life for US history, PsycINFO for psychology, etc.
Descriptions for Book Review Databases
Academic Search Premier - dates of coverage vary, but most start in the 1990s
- When best to use when looking for book reviews from journals and non-scholarly sources; better indexing than LexisNexis Academic; more periodicals indexed than Expanded Academic ASAP
- Search hints - The book title is one of the subject headings given the record with (book) after the title, and the abstract usually says Reviews [name of book] by [name of author]. You can either search the subject headings by clicking on the green Subjects button, or simply type in unique words from the title and the author, and the word reviews.
Book Review Index - print index back to 1965, found on Level 2 of the Library, call number INDEX Z1035.A1 .B6
- When best to use finding older scholarly book reviews, looks at more journals and magazines than Book Review Digest does
- Search hints - Entries are arranged by author of the book. Start first with the year the book was published, but if you don't find an entry, try the subsequent year. (It may take a year or two for a book to be reviewed.) There are some multi-year cumulative indexes as well. Note the length of the review, indicated by the rough number of words, e.g. 150w is 150 words. To figure out what the name of the periodical is from the abbreviation, look in the beginning of the volume for a list of sources.
Expanded Academic ASAP - ? - present, starting date varies depending on the periodical, but on average 1980
- When best to use looking for book reviews from journals and non-scholarly sources; better indexing than LexisNexis Academic; goes back farther in time than Academic Search Premier
- Search hints - The book title is always part of the title of the article along with (book review). In contrast to Academic Search Premier, the title is not one of the subject headings given the book. Therefore, type in unique words from the title and the author, and the phrase "book review."
LexisNexis Academic - ? - present, starting date varies depending on the periodical, but on average 1990, and at best 1969
- When best to use finding recent, mainstream book reviews
- Finding book reviews - Click on Guided News Search; then choose Arts & Sports for the first box, then Book, movie, music & play reviews in the second box to narrow specifically to reviews. However, in this subset there are only 17 sources covered, so if you don't find a review for your book, try under General News or US News in the first box for content from more newspapers and magazines.
Web of Science - Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, & Social Sciences Citation Index, back to 1987
- When best to use want fairly recent book reviews from scholarly journals
- Search hints - Click on Full Search, then General Search. Type in unique words from the title and the last name of the author in the box labeled Topic, then scroll down and in the Set Search Limits boxes highlight Book Review in the Document Type pull-down menu.
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