Book Review Resources

Academic Index, Expanded
Citations, abstracts and some full text of reviews of popular fiction and non-fiction books. Search by title, author; citation will often contain the words "book review" in parentheses. Many have full text of the article in Academic Index; use the SFX link to check for full text of the articles on other services.

Book Review Index
Print volumes located in Linderman Library (L-1-Index).Citations to reviews of popular and some scholarly books. Use key at the front of volumes to translate cryptic abbreviations into titles where reviews can be found. Use ASA, Lehigh's Library Catalog to determine if the source publication where the book review appears is available at the library.

LEXIS/NEXIS Academic
The Lexis/Nexis News category, Art & Sports, allows you to search within its "Book, Music & Play Reviews" section, but searching in the General News and US News sections is likely to provide a wider varietyof reviews and news. Repeat your search in multiple categories. Search by title and author.

The Literature Resource Center

(Includes Contemporary Authors and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (DLB)). Search by author name or title of work. The tab for Literary Criticism, Articles, and Work Overviews will give you citations and often full text of articles.

Research Library
You can also try searching in the Research Library databases, by title/author, adding 'and review' to your search statement. The search results show which articles include full text-- use the SFX link to get to others.

Web of Science & Knowledge
The combined Science Citation Index, Social Science Citation Index, and Arts & Humanities Citation Index files, includes in its general search the ability to restrict to Book Reviews. Use the SFX link to check for full text.


Search Full text Journals

JSTOR:

Book reviews from many full text journals online can be located through JSTOR, a collection of online journals. Journal holdings in JSTOR are usually a few years or more before the current issue. Choose Search, type in the title and author of the book, and choose subject set(s) of periodicals to search.

Project MUSE

Project MUSE, another collection of full text journals online, will allow you to limit your search to the 'Author Reviewed' or 'Title Reviewed'-- click on Search, then change 'All Fields' to 'Author Reviewed' or 'Title Reviewed'.



Subject Indexes:


If you are looking for reviews of a book on a scholarly subject that does not seem to be reviewed in general sources, try the subject indexes in the discipline: ABI-Inform for Business, Medline for medical books, Engineering Index for Engineering books, Historical Abstracts for History, Social Sciences Abstracts, PsycLit, and Sociological Abstracts for Social Sciences, MLA bibliography for literature, etc. To see a list of the subject databases, check out the Lehigh Library Database Finder: http://databases.lib.lehigh.edu/finder/



Scholarly literature analysis

Serious works of fiction and literature are covered in a number of publications.

Start by using the Literature Resource Center (above).

If you think the author is famous, begin by looking up the author name in ASA as a subject to find out if we have any books on him or her.

Also, try searching the MLA Bibliography, as well as Academic Index, Research Library and JSTOR / Project MUSE.



The Internet Public Library's Online Literary Criticism Collection
Provides links to literary criticism up on the web, covering a variety of authors and titles.



Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and Borders.com
These online booksellers not only include excerpts of reviews of books from various print sources, but also allow their readers to post their own reviews. (Negative reviews may be omitted.) Only a small fraction ofthe entries have print reviews; the others have notes or annotations from the publishers.


Last updated: Tuesday, 23-Dec-2008 02:44:43 EST