Looking for book reviews

A classroom assignment will often require you to find reviews of a certain book that were published in scholarly journals.  The simplest way of doing this is to use the limiters on the lower half of the Advanced Search screen, below the words Limit your results.

There are many options available in this area : you can choose to bring up only articles available in full text online; only articles with abstracts; only articles published in peer-reviewed journals (as opposed to more popular publications); articles published between certain specified dates, and so on.  There is also a box in which you can enter the title of a specific journal, which gives you another way to make that choice.

Notice the little box labelled Publication Type.  If you scroll down that menu, you will find that Review is one of the options.  Click on Review to select it.

In the Search boxes at the top of the screen, enter the title of the book for which you are seeking reviews.  For example, suppose you need reviews of H. Richard Niebuhr’s pivotal work Christ and Culture.  If you enter that title without limiting your search to book reviews, you will also retrieve lots of unrelated articles.  But if you use this limiter, you will more efficiently retrieve a set of book reviews about this particular work.

If you find that you are retrieving many records about other works with similar or related titles, you might want to add the name of the author to focus in precisely on the work you want.