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Find Scholarly Book Reviews

Scholarly book reviews are found in scholarly journals, so use disciplinary article indexes and limit your search to 'book reviews'.

America: History & Life with Full Text, Historical Abstracts Index covering the history and culture of the United States and Canada, from prehistory to the present.
Bibliography of British and Irish History Guide on published writing on British and Irish history covering the history of British and Irish relations with the rest of the world, including the British empire and the Commonwealth, as well as British and Irish domestic history.
PubMedCentral
PubMed Central® (PMC) is a free full-text archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature at the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Library of Medicine (NIH/NLM).
Medline (OCLC) Medline contains all areas of medicine, including dentistry and nursing from more than 9,000 titles. Corresponds to the print indexes - Index Medicus, Index to Dental Literature, and International Nursing Index.
Sociological Abstracts Abstracts and index of the international literature of sociology and related disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences. Subjects covered include Anthropology, Pacific and Asian Studies, Social Work, and Sociology.
PsycINFO Resource devoted to peer-reviewed literature in behavioral science and mental health by the American Psychological Association (APA). It contains over 3 million records and summaries dating as far back as the 1600s with one of the highest DOI matching rates in the publishing industry. Journal coverage, which spans from the 1800s to the present, includes international material selected from around 2,500 periodicals in dozens of languages.

Trade Reviews

Trade reviews are usually short, written by generalist reviewers, and provide enough information to endorse the book for purchase. Sometimes these can give useful information, such as connecting books on a theme or situating the book in it's publishing context.

Book Review Digest Plus Library tool that brings together book reviews on a wide range of topics, from a variety of sources. Unlike reviews on book-sale sites and the open Internet, many of the reviews are serious, academic works. This invaluable resource for literary and biographical research is essential for readers’ advisory and collection development.
Book Review Digest Retrospective: 1903-1982 Reflecting nearly eight decades of H.W. Wilson’s Book Review Digest, this Retrospective database provides excerpts from and citations to reviews of adult and juvenile fiction and non-fiction. Virtually every major idea that shaped the 20th century found expression in books. The reactions to those ideas are reflected in the reviews of those books, and this database makes it easy to search this vast record of information.
Canadian Book Review Annual Online Access to book reviews of scholarly, reference, literary, trade, children’s, and young-adult books, all Canadian authored and published.
Choice Reviews Online Source for reviews of academic books, electronic media, and Internet resources of interest to those in higher education. More than 35,000 librarians, faculty, and key decision makers rely on Choice magazine and Choice Reviews Online for collection development and scholarly research.
New York Review of Books Book reviews of fiction and non-fiction titles.

Publisher's Weekly 1990 - present.

HSTR 381 - finding, using and writing scholarly book reviews

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Find Scholarly Book Reviews

Trade Reviews