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Find Book Reviews

Types of Reviews

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.

There are some journals that primarily publish reviews:

  • One of the primary review journals for American history is Reviews in American History. The full text for this journal from 1973-2014 is available on JSTOR; issues from 1995-present are also online in another database. 
  • The Journal of American History (full text online 1964-present) is an authoritative source for book reviews in history.
  • 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.

H-Net Reviews can also be a useful source for book reviews. H-Net Reviews has reviews from 1993 to the present and is fully searchable by keyword.

Search these multiple Ebsco databases 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 should also consider adding other subject databases if appropriate, for example the ATLA Religion database.