To find a book review, it helps to know:
- Date of publication
- Author's name
- Title of book
Sources for book reviews (scholarly and popular)
- Book Review Digest (1905-present in print)
- Includes excerpts from the reviews and has a subject index. Witt's book holdings cover from 1905 to present; the online OhioLINK database just has 1983 to present.
- Book Review Index (1965-)
- Covers many more books than Book Review Digest but without the summaries. Has subject index. This is the best source for reviews of children's books. These books are blue and yellow.
- Index to Book Reviews in the Humanities (1960-1990)
- In the Older Indexes shelving in Reference
- A good source for scholarly book reviews in the Humanities
- Combined Retrospective Index to Book Reviews in Scholarly Journals 1886-1974.
- In the Older Indexes shelving in Reference
- This cumulates 88 years of scholarly book reviews into one alphabetical index arranged in 15 volumes.
- New York Times Book Review Index (1896-1970)
- Ref. Z 1219 .N4 This is just for reviews in the NYT; it has a subject index. For 1896-1977, the book reviews themselves are available in bound volumes of the New York Times Book Review, which can be found at the same call number in the Reference Storage area. More recent fulltext on microfilm & online from Lexis-Nexis (click the Power Search tab and select the New York Times from the Select Sources drop-down menu.)
In addition, many regular periodical indexes include book reviews
- Academic Search Complete
- Readers' Guide Retrospective (1890-1982)
- Social Sciences Index (Older Indexes and online Wilson Indexes (part of EZRA).
- Review citations are incorporated into the main text. Each have a separate section for book reviews at the back of each volume beginning with 1976. Humanities Index and Social Sciences Index are available in the Wilson Index on EZRA from 1984+ and 1983+ respectively.
Note: Frequently review citations don't appear for a year or two after a book has been published, so you may have to look through several issues of a given index before finding a review.