How to Find Book Reviews
You may be asked to assess books on events in American history, and one way to do so is by reading published book reviews. Many journals publish reviews when books are released. Here are some tips for finding reviews:
- In America: History & Life, you can limit your search to book reviews. To do so, click the Advanced Search link. In the Advanced Search screen, select Book Review in the Document Type list.
In the search boxes at the top, enter the book title you are searching for and select "Title" from the dropdown list. America: History & Life does index three of the most popular sources for historical book reviews: American Historical Review, Journal of American History and Reviews in American History.
JSTOR and Project Muse also allow you to limit the results to book reviews only.
- In JSTOR, go to Advanced Search. There, select the checkbox by Review in the Limit to Type area. Search for the book title, putting the book title in quotes.
- In Project Muse, select Reviews under Content Type. You can also limit the journals searched, if you wish, or restrict the search to journals about History.
- Choice Reviews Online is a source of reviews for academic books, including many books about history. In Choice, search for the terms in your book title. Do note that their disciplines names vary from what we typically use at Northwestern; titles in United States History would be found under History, Geography & Area Studies > North America.
Some recent additions to our collection: