Resources: Finding Book Reviews

Here’s a brief explanation of historiography and some guidelines to finding book reviews and review articles:

Historiography is a fancy way of referring to the way in which historians have written about a certain topic. Thus, we can talk about the historiography of the industrial revolution, the historiography of the 1920s in the United States, or the historiography of public executions. The term is useful because it helps us see that every monograph on a topic is not the same. To take one example, the historiography of public executions in early modern Europe reveals a number of different approaches: some historians have seen the public execution as the spectacle of state authority, others have seen it as a popular carnival, still others have seen it as the measure of an early modern indifference to the sight of bodily pain.

How do you go about understanding the historiography of a topic? Well, your professors might lecture you on how historians have approached a topic. But if you are setting out on your own for a research paper, there are some important places to look that will make your work much easier:
* book reviews in scholarly journals,
* review articles in scholarly journals (not the same as book reviews as I’ll explain),
* and the introductions to secondary works of history.

What is a review article and how is it different from a book review? A book review in a scholarly journal is one or two pages. In a book review, an author reviews one, sometimes two, books. A review article is anywhere from five to twenty five pages. In a review article, an author will treat anywhere from two or three books to ten. Review articles are typically subtitled: review essay, thematic essay, review article.

How can you find book reviews and review articles? Follow the links to the following resources. You may have to spend some time with each of these getting acquainted with the search features. For some, say JSTOR, you can specify a search for book reviews. In some databases (say in Electronic Journal Center) you can use “review article,” or just “review,” as a keyword. In others (say, Historical Abstracts) you can actually search for the subject “witchcraft (review articles).”

Academic Search Premier
http://search.epnet.com/login.asp?profile=web&defaultdb=aph
Large, multidisciplinary database of scholarly journals

JSTOR
http://www.jstor.org/
Full text database of many important scholarly journals from their founding. Does not include last five years.

The History Cooperative
http://www.historycooperative.org/
Full text, and fully searchable, database of many important history journals. Includes just the current issues of these journals

Electronic Journal Center (OhioLINK)
http://journals.ohiolink.edu/cgi-bin/sciserv.pl?collection=journals
Full text of 4300+ research journals. Includes or has links to full text.

Historical Abstracts
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/databases/login/habs
Index and abstracts to articles covering world history from 1450 to present (excluding U.S. and Canada). Includes or has links to full text.

America: History and Life
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/databases/login/ahnl
You should also know about the companion database to Historical Abstracts which includes indexes, abstracts, and some full text for American history.

Book Review Digest (1983-)
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/databases/login/brdi
Index and excerpts from reviews of English-language fiction and nonfiction.