Book Reviews Guide
Overview
You will usually need to know the author, title, and maybe the date the book was published. If you don't have the book handy, consult WestCat, our catalog, or if we don't own it, try WorldCat, a very large database listing books in libraries all over the world.
Book Reviews
Book Review Index Provides reviews of general interest and some scholarly books published in the US since 1965. This doesn't have the excerpts from reviews that Book Review Digest provides, nor does it go back to 1905, but it does index many more periodicals.
Print: Z 1035 .A1 B6 (Ref)
Book Review Digest Indexes and excerpts reviews of English-language fiction and nonfiction books published in leading periodicals. Scholarly books, textbooks, government publications, and technical books are excluded. Online coverage: 1983-present. Updated weekly.
Book Review Digest Retrospective 1905-1982 Indexes and excerpts reviews of 300,000 English-language fiction and nonfiction books published in leading periodicals. Scholarly books, textbooks, government publications, and technical books are excluded.
Print: Z 1219 .C96 (Ref)
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New York Times Book Review Use the search box to look for New York Times Book Reviews from 1981 to the present.
New York Review of Books Search the archives of this bi-weekly journal for book reviews from 1963 to the present. Unfortunately only a selection will be available full text, but we have the print edition in Reference at AP 2 .N655
Article Databases
Book reviews are also found in general article indexes, and scholarly books are reviewed in specialized indexes that you can find under Article Indexes or Book Reviews in the subject guides.ProQuest Research Library Indexes popular magazines, scholarly journals, newspapers and trade publications in a wide range of subject areas, including business, education, humanities, social sciences, and sciences. Full-text available for over 2,500 journals. Coverage from 1971.
InfoTrac General OneFile Indexes news and periodical articles on a wide variety of topics. Millions of articles are full-text. Coverage: 1980-present.
Web of Science Contains three major databases: (1) Science Citation Index Expanded (1900-present), (2) Social Sciences Citation Index (1956-present), and (3) Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975-present). Cited Ref. Search allows users to search for articles that cite a particular author or work. Tutorial
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RefWorks Info: For Import Filter, choose "ISI (Institute for Scientific Information)". For Database, choose "Web of Science". This database allows you under "Advanced Search" to limit a search by author and title of a book just to locate book review citations.
LexisNexis Academic Indexes thousands of domestic and foreign newspapers, as well as journals, and other publications in News, Business company reports and articles, Legal Research, Medical and Reference. The legal research category includes law reviews, law news, federal and state laws and cases. Mostly full text. Includes Hoover's full text. Coverage dates vary.
Readers' Guide Retrospective Indexes the most popular general-interest periodicals published in the United States from 1890 to 1982. Some of these periodicals published short stories and book reviews.
Print: AI 3 .R48 (Ref.) 1904-98
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Other Sources
Classic Library Catalog
WMU's Classic online catalog (also known as WestCat), is used to identify books (including electronic books), government documents, journals, audio and video, slides and other items in the University Libraries' collections. The catalog can be searched by title, author, subject heading, keyword, call number, and more.
For many of the more recent books, the catalog now has cover images. If you click on the cover image in the record of the book, you will often get a summary and brief reviews from Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, and other sources.
Google Scholar This service from Google searches scholarly literature, including articles, theses, books and technical reports from many areas of research. Some materials are free, some will be available to WMU users by clicking on Find it @WMU, while others will require a fee. Please remember to use library databases for a more complete search of scholarly literature. Enter the title of the book in quotes and add "book review" to your search.
Amazon.com The largest online bookstore now sells much more than books. Includes reviews and suggests similar books. Amazon sometimes provides book reviews from reliable published sources. Often they have readers comments, which you have to read critically, though they may give you valuable insights.
Google Currently the largest and most popular search engine for the web. Return set is ranked by relevancy. Advanced ways of searching available. You can search more than just Google Scholar by entering the title of your book in quotes and adding "book review" in regular Google, but you will have to be careful in evaluating the results and making sure they are reliable.
Boston U. Libraries Guide: Book Reviews For more specialized book review indexes, both in print and online, see this excellent list. Please note that this includes some resources our libraries do not own and that we cannot click into many of their online resources, but check our catalog, as we own many of them.
Ask A Librarian
Maira Bundza, E-mail: maira.bundza@wmich.edu
Phone: 269-387-5207
Last updated: November 2006