Some book review sources are not appropriate for scholarly work. Avoid reviews in popular magazines such as Choice, Library Journal, Publisher's Weekly, Booklist, etc. Reviews in these kinds of publications are not scholarly reviews.
Aim to collect book reviews from scholarly journals.
In addition, book reviews in publications like The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books may be acceptable as they are often written by scholars.
Book reviews help you determine if a book is relevant to your topic, of course. And some book reviews are "review articles" wherein the reviewer discusses multiple books in context with each other and with the broader topic at large. But book reviews can also be a source of opinion and commentary by reviewers on the topics suggested in the books under review.
The scholarly online community, H-Net Reviews has reviews from 1993 to the present and is fully searchable by keyword.
Reviews in American History. The full text for this journal from 1973-2018 is available on JSTOR.
Reviews in History is an online-only journal (free) publishing lengthy scholarly reviews, since 1996, of "significant work in all fields of historical interest."
History: Reviews of New Books has tables of contents from 2006 (only) available online. Use Tipasa interlibrary loan to get full articles.
You can limit a search to book reviews in JSTOR by selecting the "Reviews" item type:
TIP: When searching for a book title in JSTOR, put quotation marks around the title.
And, if your book has fairly common title words, you should also use the author's last name in the second search box.
Items that are not already in full text in JSTOR might be available in other databases or in Seymour Library. Click the 
button to check for full text elsewhere.
View this brief video (2:02) about finding book reviews in JSTOR.
Search the history databases and Book Review Digest simultaneously to find book reviews:
Historical Abstracts covers reviews in history journals for non-North American history. America: History & Life is the best source for scholarly book reviews for topics in North American history. Add Academic Search Complete, which is a good general database covering scholarly journals in many different disciplines, and the book review database Book Review Digest, to get the best search possible. You could also consider adding other subject databases if appropriate, for example the Political Science Complete database.
1. After clicking on a link to get to an EBSCO database, click on the link to the database that appears at the top:
2. Select all the relevant database from the list.
3. type in the title of the book in the search box. Then, scroll down to "Publication Type" and select "Review" from the list. Note: you can also filter by publication type after getting a results list by clicking on the All filters button:
Click on the link to the full text if available. Otherwise, click on Access Options, then click on the Find It link. This will open your citation in a Knox Primo window. Login to Knox Primo to see options for getting the full text or requesting the article via interlibrary loan.
Book Review Digest indexes book reviews in magazines and journals from 1965 to the present.
Put the title of the book in the search box, then select the TI Title index, like this:
There will be some full text reviews in the database, but if the review you seek is not there in full text, use the (Find It) button to get the review by another method.
