Finding Book Reviews
What is a Book Review?
A review is a critical evaluation of a literary work, published in a journal or newspaper shortly after the work is published. Reviews of academic books are often written by scholars who have expertise in the genre or subject matter of the work being reviewed. Reviews may be brief (one or two paragraphs) or relatively long (two to three pages).
Of the many thousands of books published each year, most receive only one or two reviews, or are not reviewed at all. A book whose content is controversial, or one written by a well-known author, may receive a disproportionate number of reviews. Books with political content are often reviewed in publications which represent differing points of view on the political spectrum (left, right, centre).
How to find a review
Step 1: To locate a book review, you must know the basic bibliographic information about the book: author's name, title of the book, and year of publication. Find these details from the library catalogue. This information will help you decide which databases or printed indexes you will need to search.
Step 2: Search the appropriate databases / index(es)
There are a number of databases you can search that provide references to book reviews. Depending on the publication date and subject matter, you may need to look for book reviews in several different databases.
Step 3: Search
A basic search on the title of the book and the author’s last name will find articles written about the book. NOTE Some databases allow you to limit your search to a document type- in this case select “book review”.
Step 4: Locate the publication in the library collection
Some reviews will be available electronically in full-text. If the full text is not available look up the title of the journal in the Library catalogue to determine if we have print holdings or electronic access to the year and issue that you need.