Research Guides: English: Find Book Reviews

Newspaper book review sources

Nexis Uni
Nexis Uni features more than 17,000 news, business, and legal sources—including U.S. Supreme Court decisions dating back to 1790. With an intuitive interface that offers quick discovery across all content types, students can create individual user IDs and passwords to enable the setting of alerts, and saving searches and documents of interest. Collaboration tools make it easy for students to team up on research projects efficiently.
Use is restricted to current faculty and staff and currently-enrolled students of Davidson College only.
Historical Newspapers
Includes full-text coverage of US newspapers listed below, with the earliest starting in the late 19th century and many continuing through the 20th century.
Davidson has purchased perpetual access to:
Atlanta Daily World (1931-2010)
Chicago Defender (1909-2010)
Chinese Newspapers Collection (1832 - 1953)
Cleveland Call and Post (1934-1991)
Los Angeles Sentinel (1934-2005)
New York Amsterdam News (1922-1993)
Norfolk Journal and Guide (1916-2010)
Philadelphia Tribune (1912-2001)
Pittsburgh Courier (1911-2002)
The Atlanta Constitution (1868-1945)
The Baltimore Afro-American (1893-1988)
The New York Times with Index (1851-2013)
The Wall Street Journal (1889-1999)
The Washington Post (1877-1999)
The Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Historical Archive, 1902-2014
(1902-2014) Digital facsimiles of more than 300,000 reviews, letters, poems, and articles and also provides information about anonymous contributors.
Part of Gale Primary Sources

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General tips

To locate a book review, first determine the book’s publication date. If you don't have the publication date, search the library catalog or ask a librarian for help.

After you have identified the book's original publication date, select appropriate databases to search. Be sure that the database covers the time period in which the book was published.

Finally, remember that not every book is reviewed.

To locate criticism and analysis of a literary work, consult one of the sources listed on the Research Guides pages, especially those for English, French, German, Russian, or Spanish.

Recommended book review sources

Book Review Digest & Book Review Digest Retrospective
(1905 to present) Indexes and excerpts reviews of over 850,000 English-language books; covers both fiction and non-fiction.

More book review sources

Alternative Press Index
Library has: 1995 to present
Reference Stacks: AI3 .A48
Indexes book reviews in periodicals such as The Advocate, The Nation, The Utne Reader, and other "radical" or "alternative" periodicals.
To find book reviews: Start searching in the volume covering the year that the book was published; at the back of the volume, there is a section for "Book Reviews," which is arranged alphabetically by book author. Some reviews also appear in the main part of the index, but the most complete list is in the back.

Annual Bibliography of English Language & Literature
(1920 to present) Indexes journal articles, essays, and books, book reviews, and critical editions of literary works published world-wide; covers all literatures in English as well as the English language, bibliography, textual studies, and the history of publishing.
Women's Issues and Identities
Women's Issues and Identities provides the opportunity to witness history from the female perspective. Offering coverage of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Women's Issues and Identities allows for the serendipitous discovery of commonalities among a variety of archival collections.
Global in scope, the archive presents materials covering the social, political, and professional aspects of women's lives and offers a look at the roles, experiences, and achievements of women in society. A wide range of primary sources provide a close look at some of the pioneers of women's history, a deep dive into the issues that have affected women, and the many contributions they have made to society.
JSTOR
JSTOR access includes over 50,000 eBooks; full-text archive of the back issues of major scholarly journals; 19th Century British Pamphlets, a collection of journals, monographs, and manuscripts related to Ireland, and some current journal issues. The eBooks work just like journals, offering unlimited use and DRM-free chapter downloads in PDF format.
Gale Literature Resource Center
Full-text biographies, critical essays, journal articles, and excerpts of criticism and reviews; covers dramatists, essayists, novelists, poets, and other writers from all time periods. Researchers can find up-to-date analysis, biographical information, overviews, full-text literary criticism, and reviews on more than 130,000 writers in all disciplines, from all time periods, and from around the world.
Includes Contemporary Authors, The Dictionary of Literary Biography, and substantial portions of Gale's other literature criticism series, including the Scribner Writers Series. Also includes the Gale's Literary Index and the Encyclopedia of Literature.
MLA International Bibliography with Full Text
The MLA International Bibliography covers scholarship in a broad range of Humanities disciplines related to global literatures and languages. Coverage includes materials published in more than 100 countries and in more than 50 languages, in the areas of literatures and languages from around the world
Periodicals Index Online
Periodicals Index Online is a database of millions of citations for articles published in the arts, humanities and social sciences, across more than 300 years. It enables researchers quickly and comprehensively to identify articles relevant to their field of study and reduces what could take years of research to a matter of minutes. Journals indexed span 37 key subject areas and multiple languages.
Project MUSE
(c. mid-1990s to present) A collection of over 700 full-text journals and more than 65,000 eBooks published by university and scholarly presses. Covers the humanities and social sciences. Titles are DRM-free allowing for unlimited access, downloading and printing, and simultaneous usage.
The MUSE platform offers 100% complete, full-text, journal, book, and related content from over 200 not-for-profit publishers including many of the world's most distinguished university presses, scholarly societies, independent publishers, and academic departments.
Readers' Guide Full Text Mega & Readers' Guide Index Retrospective
(1890 to present) Citations to articles in over 300 popular U.S. magazines. Covers a wide variety of subjects, including art, business, education, food, foreign affairs, political science, religion, science, sports, and health and nutrition. Also indexes book and film reviews.