Reviews in scholarly journals evaluate books and the research, theory, and methodology therein. Scholarly reviews also discuss how the book relates to other books on the subject. These lengthy reviews allow readers to stay current with research and thought in their field even if it is outside their direct area of interest and they are unlikely to read the entire book.  Some of the ways to locate scholarly book reviews in history are:

Using subject specific journal indexes.  

Most of the titles indexed will be scholarly.  The library offers several of these databases on the campus network, accessible from campus, office or home.   Examples include:

• America:  History and Life (screen samples) (connect -- Rutgers only)
• Humanities Abstracts
• Sociofile
• Web of Science (includes humanities and social sciences)
  

The library has both Book Review Digest (BRD) and Book Review Index (BRI). BRD provides excerpts from reviews, and there is a cumulative 1902-1974 index. BRI indexes many more publications but does not provide excerpts. These indexes are only available in print at our library and they index all types of publications. Some hints on using them and on evaluating the reviews are:

• look items up by author, or by title if there is no author
•  if you are unsure of the author’s name, use the title index in the back of each volume
•  look in the year the book was published and in the next 2 years; scholarly book reviews are often slow to appear in print
• don’t guess at the periodical title abbreviations; look at the key in the front of each volume
• look at the length of the review; scholarly reviews are longer than other kinds of reviews
• look closely at the title of the periodical; JAH (Journal of American History) is more scholarly than NYTBR (New York Times Book Review)

Electronic Journal Collections

The library subscribes to a number of electronic journal packages, usually grouped by subject.  These packages will often let you search all the journals in that package at one time, and will also often let you limit to article type, such as book review.  The two most likely to be useful for history are:

• Project Muse:
• JSTOR

You can use these databases to locate book reviews. Some articles or reviews are included in their full text, meaning every word from the article is included.  However, since it indexes publications for a variety of disciplines and at a variety of levels (popular, professional, substantive news, and some scholarly) you will have to look very closely at the periodical titles or the periodicals themselves to be sure you are locating scholarly reviews.  Some of these databases, such as Academic Search Premiere, allow the  option of limiting your search to peer reviewed (scholarly) journals.  Some useful indexes of this type are:

• Academic Search Premiere (EbscoHost)
• PCI: Periodical Contents Index

Depending on the subject of your book there may be other relevant databases. If your book is on medical history in some way, such as the 1918 influenza epidemic, or Civil War nursing, you might want to search medical databases, either Medline or CINAHL, for reviews from journals in those areas. If your book focuses on literature in any way you might want to search the MLA Bibliography for reviews. There are a variety of subject oriented databases and indexes available in the library. Ask at the Reference Desk if you would like suggestions on which ones would be most relevant for you.

Certainly there are some valuable historical materials on the Internet, and, in fact, most of the library databases you use are accessible through the Internet. However, searching Alta Vista or Yahoo or Google for book reviews or looking at those posted at Amazon.com is not an effective way of finding scholarly reviews. There is very little oversight on the Internet and reviews you find at random are more likely to have been written by a high school English student or a friend of the author than by a scholar. If you want to use the Internet to find historical material, including book reviews, start with a reputable history gateway site. There is an excellent gateway source, which will lead you to scholarly reviews on the Internet, available through Rutgers. At the Rutgers Libraries Home page (http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu) select Subject Research Guides, then History -- American and British.