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English: Book Reviews

Finding Book Reviews

To find book reviews, you'll need to know the title and author of the book. Knowing the date it was first published is also very important, because most reviews are published shortly after the book.

Library databases that provide access to historic newspapers and magazines will be a good place to start looking for 18th, 19th, and early 20th century works. For more recent books, choose databases that provide access to contemporary journals and newspapers will be more helpful.  There are also several social social networking sites that specialise in book reviews by members.

Find Book Reviews in Library Databases

Library databases to search for reviews, organised into Historic and Current.

These indexes can help you to find historic book (or theatre) reviews that were publised closer to a time a book or poem was published (or a play was performed).  They will usually only provide a citation, so you'll need to check Library Search | Ketu (or Google books) to see if you can access the original newspaper or magazine that the review appeared in (e.g. The Edinburgh Review).

Note: The source title will often be abbreviated (e.g. GM = Gentleman's Magazine), so you may need to check the list of abbreviations at the start of the index. 

If you're looking for reviews of a specific book, the best way to them is to search these databases for the Book Title and/or Author, and look for a way to limit your results to Book Reviews (Note: reviews are not always classified separately from articles).

Find Reviews in on Social Networking Sites