Book Reviews: A Finding Guide: Online Resources

Covers 1975 to date with some earlier coverage. Academic Search Premier indexes more than 13,000 journals and magazines with the full text of 4,700 titles. To limit your search to reviews, on the Advanced Search page, under Document Type, you can choose Book Reviews.

Free online resource.
Date coverage unknown. Primarily a bookselling site, Amazon.com sometimes includes the full text of some published book reviews--"Editorial reviews". Their "Search inside the book" function allows viewing of selected, scanned pages--usually the covers, table of contents, index, and an excerpt from the main text. Also includes user reviews, of highly variable quality and usefulness. Overall, a very useful site for evaluating recent trade and academic books. Access to the scanned table of contents and index is very useful for nonfiction titles.

Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio.
Covers 1954 to date. Book reviews in U.S. and Canadian history only. Indexes about 6,000 book and media reviews from over one hundred academic journals. NB: there are no reviews in the sister database, Historical Abstracts. To limit your search to reviews, enter the book title in quotes in the default Advanced Search box.

(Part of ProQuest One Literature)
Covers 1920 to date. "ABELL, which can be accessed via the Criticism screen in Literature Online's Search: Criticism and Reference, contains more than 860,000 records covering monographs, periodical articles, critical editions of literary works, book reviews, collections of essays and doctoral dissertations published anywhere in the world; unpublished doctoral dissertations are covered for the period 1920-1999. The bibliography consists of 77 volumes, beginning in 1920 and issued annually; a number of items published between 1892 and 1919 have been indexed retrospectively. All aspects and periods of English literature are covered, from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. British, American and Commonwealth writing are all represented. Coverage is international.

This powerful search engine works across many databases and pulls together a wide variety of resources. Enter a book title in the search box to find reviews.

[S.l.]: American Theological Library Association.
Covers 1949 to date. Book reviews in religion only. Incorporates the printed Index to Book Reviews in Religion (IBRR). Primarily academic titles.

Book Review Digest Plus is canceled. For online searching, use Academic Search Premier's Advanced Search and choose Book Reviews under Document Type.

New York: R. R. Bowker.
Coverage limited to titles in print or recently out of print. A database of bibliographic records for books, audiotapes, and videos from over 44,000 North American publishers. Many records include full-text reviews. Titles with reviews are starred. Click on the book title to open the record, then click on the "Professional reviews" link at left. The full record also may have synopses/annotations, book jacket text, media mentions, and a list of awards.

Coverage begins online in September, 1998. caa.reviews "publishes timely scholarly and critical reviews of studies and projects in all areas and periods of art history, visual studies, and the fine arts, providing peer review for the disciplines served by the College Art Association. Publications and projects reviewed include books, articles, exhibitions, conferences, digital scholarship, and other works as appropriate" [Mission Statement]

French-language collection of journals and magazines. To find books reviewed, search the title of the book.

A searchable journal of reliable reviews of academic books for community college, college, and university libraries.
Covers 01/01/2011 to date.
Older reviews are available in the print version.
Published by the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL).

Osnabrück, Germany: F. Dietrich.
Online version covers 1984(?) to date. The print version (Library Annex + AI 9 .I612) covers 1971-2011.
Print version canceled in 2011.
Emphasis on reviews appearing in European social sciences and humanities journals. German or English interface.
For coverage of 1911-1943, see Bibliographie der Rezensionen under the print resources section in this guide.

A large collection of searchable and browseable full-text scholarly journals. Covers from the beginning of the journal (earliest is 1665) up to within two to five years of the present [the "moving wall": https://support.jstor.org/hc/en-us/articles/115004879547-About-the-Moving-Wall]. To find book reviews, select Advanced Search. In the Advanced Search page, type one or two keywords from the book title in the first search box. Under Narrow Your Search to "These Types," check the Review box. Click Search.

ProQuest
Coverage and format: Mostly mid 2000s to date, some coverage from the late 1990s. Plain text. In English, French, Guarani, Portuguese, and Spanish.
92 titles from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Costa Rica, Peru, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela.

Covers book reviews in library and information science periodicals published in the United States and elsewhere. Indexing starts in 1981.

Covers January 3, 1988 to date. Access via the ProQuest publications list.

Oxford University Press.
Offers peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies (essentially thumbnail reviews) of books and journals on specific topics in a growing range of subject areas. There are at least 50 specific topical bibliographies in each subject area. Each of these features an introduction to the topic. Bibliographies are browseable by subject area and keyword searchable. Contains a "My OBO" function that allows users to create personalized bibliographies of individual citations from different bibliographies.

[was PCI: Periodical Contents Index]
Covers 1770-1993. Searches can be restricted to book reviews only. Click the box under "Scope" on the search page. Provides comprehensive indexing to the contents of 4,250 periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues (some as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries) to 1993. The scope is international, including journals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other Western languages. Journals that are indexed in PCI which have full text available in JSTOR are linked at article level.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Coverage varies by title, beginning no earlier than 1993, and running through the current issue. Project MUSE covers the full text of over 200 journals in literature and criticism, history, the visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, gender studies, economics, and others. To find book reviews, choose Advanced Search and use the pulldown menu under Limit Search and By Type to select Review.

Links to 36 major and regional U.S., Canadian, and UK newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The Guardian. Coverage starts from 1/1/2008 with a three-month embargo on full text.

Coverage varies by title but begins with the first year of publication. Full image access to reviews appearing in major U.S. and international newspapers. Useful for access to the drawings and illustrations that sometimes accompany New York Times reviews as well as reviews in Le Monde, the Irish Times, and the Globe and Mail. Searches by document type can only be limited to "reviews." This includes theatrical and musical reviews.

Links to five multi-title regional newspaper collections covering 30 newspapers in all. Coverage starts from either 1/1/2008, 1/1/2009, 1/1/2010, 1/1/2011, or 1/1/2012 with a two-week to three-month embargo on full text.

Ann Arbor: ProQuest.
Coverage varies. Indexes general interest magazines and scholarly journals in the social sciences, humanities, and sciences. Also included are citations and abstracts for some newspapers and selected television and radio programs. The full text of some articles is provided. Under Document type you can click Reviews to limit your search results.

Bronx, NY: H.W. Wilson and Ipswich, MA: EBSCO Publishing.
Book reviews appearing in popular magazines. Entries are sometimes labeled Book Review or Review. Beware of alternate spellings of international authors' names.

Firenze: Casalini Libri.
Covers 1994 to 2014. "Each year Reference Reviews Europe offers around 300 English-language reviews of European reference titles. The journal is published in two forms: the electronic Reference Reviews Europe Online (RREO) and the printed Reference Reviews Europe Annual (RREA) (Uris Z 1002 .R32, 1995-, latest volume in Olin Reference). Much of the content consists of abstracts in English of reviews that originally appeared in the German journal Informationsmittel: IFB (IFB) [previous title Informationsmittel für Bibliotheken]. IFB, edited by Klaus Schreiber of the Württembergische Landesbibliothek in Stuttgart, and formerly published by the Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut in Berlin, currently is available only online. Since its inception in 1993, it has reviewed more than 500 titles per year, covering reference materials in all subjects and formats. Although German-language publications predominate in IFB, titles in other European languages, including French, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, and Spanish are also covered. The reviewers for IFB are mostly German librarians and academics. The abstractors for Reference Reviews Europe are mainly North American librarians."
[adapted from the RREO Website]

Covers 1902 to 2014.

Covers 2010 to date via Exact Editions.

Philadelphia: Institute for Scientific Information.
Web of Science Core Collection includes Science Citation Index (1945 to date), Social Sciences Citation Index (1956 to date), Arts & Humanities Citation Index (1975 to date), and more. A multi-disciplinary set of databases indexing thousands of titles. To limit your search to book reviews, select Advanced Search and highlight "Book review" in the box under "Restrict search by languages and document types."