Finding Book Reviews

Book reviews are, in effect, a particular type of journal article. For this reason, you can usually find them in Article Databases or Indexes. This page will show you how to do this and give you some tips on doing it most efficiently.

• the year the book was originally published
• the coverage years of the article database(s) you intend to use

Year of Publication

Most books that are ever going to be reviewed will be reviewed within a year or two of their original publication dates. Some books are never reviewed at all.

To find a review of a book, therefore, you need to find when it was first published. You can usually find this information on the Title Page of the book:

If you don't see the publication date on the front of the title page, look on the back (see below).

Note that the copyright and printing dates may not be the same. If the book has appeared in several different editions, the first edition is the most likely one to have been reviewed. Later editions are less likely to be reviewed than first editions.

Using Article Databases

After determining when the book was published, you need to be sure that the article databases you look in cover that time period.

Some of them clearly show that information, for example America: History and Life.

Others, however, do not make it easy to find their years of coverage. To find this information, you will need to go digging in various Help pages or information pages about the database. As it happens, this database, Book Review Index, is a very good general source for book reviews and its coverage goes from 1965 to the present.

The best way to search for a book review is to search for its complete title. Many databases will let you limit your search to "Article Types" such as Book Reviews, which can help focus your search. Adding the author's name to the search can help narrow the search results even further, if need be.

Using Search Limiters to Find Book Reviews

Identifying Databases with Book Reviews

While many article databases do include book reviews, other do not. The following are a few good article databases for book review searches in all subject areas.

Many other article databases contain citations for books reviews, too. InfoTree records for these databases are marked in the Libraries' as in this example.

Note the highlighting of the phrase Includes Book Reviews.

Or you can see a complete listing of these databases.