Q. How do I find a book review?

A typical book review is a type of article, some of which might be more acceptable than others depending on what your instructor requires for your assignment. You can find book reviews within magazines, journals, and newspapers, which are all periodicals. Book reviews are typically labeled as such, or are printed in a specific section of a periodical. 

A review found on a platform like Goodreads, however, is not an article but rather more of a "post" and likely would not count for your assignment, even though they are "reviewing" a work. There are many websites and blogs online outside of library resources that focus on book reviews too. Be sure to know what type of book review your instructor is asking for according to your particular assignment, as not all book reviews are the same quality or for the same audience.

Resources for book reviews in databases, websites, blogs and podcasts are listed on the following library research guide: Find a Book Review.

Here's 3 other tips to get you started: 

• Many of our databases, such as Academic Search Premier from Ebscohost, offer an advanced searching limiter to retrieve book reviews specifically ("Document Type"):
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• If you know of a specific publication that offers book reviews (such as if your instructor told you to look for one there), you could search for that publication in the Discovery catalog. Then, search through the publication for reviews on a particular book or all reviews published in a certain timeframe, such as The New York Times Book Review.  To do this, select a database in the catalog result that comes up (such as in the previous example link) under "Access Online," based on the coverage (1985-01-06~present is listed on some for the NYTs Book Review, but not the default database as of 11/2023). To learn how to search within a publication for an article, see this FAQ. Sometimes using the terms "Book review" or the author name can help bring up a relevant result to a review for a book you are searching for:
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• Sometimes Googling book reviews will get you to relevant content as well. Here's an example of a Google Advanced Search, searching through a specific publication for a topic (in this case, a book), where relevant results come up. If you run into a paywall, copy and paste the title of the article into the Discovery Catalog to see if we grant access or place an interlibrary loan request for the content: 
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