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Steps to Searching for Book Reviews
- Before you begin...
To find a book review for a particular resource, you will need the following information before conducting your search:
- Author's name
- Title of the book
- Year of publication
For instance, author's name: Atwood, Margaret; title of the book: "Alias Grace" (putting this in quotation marks will ensure you only get books with those exact words in that order). Year of publication is 1996. However, because some pre-publication reviews of books appear the year before it comes out, depending on the month of release, it is a good idea to select 1995 (see right corner of the image) to ensure your search captures results that appeared in 1995. For the end date, selecting 2000 is a good choice because "Alias Grace" was a very popular book when it was first published, and reviews appeared a few years after its publication. Thus, selecting 2000 is a good way to ensure that we can capture as many results from that specific range that are going to apply to us.
If you do not have this information, search York libraries' OMNI AlI-in-One Search by title or author. If you cannot find the information in OMNI, try looking in another library catalogue. If you are still unable to find the book, ask for assistance from staff at any of our libraries.
- Pick a review resource
Most major book review sources, such as The New York Times, The Times of London, and The Globe and Mail, have book review sections. If you are having difficulty finding review coverage from one of these media outlets or require more reviews, or check:
- Search by date
Many book review resources are organized by year of publication. Start with the year the book was published. If you do not find a reference to your book in the year it was published, check the following years. You may find reviews of a book across more than one year. Note: reviews in scholarly journals appear up to two or three years after a book has been published.
- Copy the Citation
- name of the periodical in which the review appeared
- volume and issue numbers
- date
- page number
- Search OMNI for the review
Once you have your reference, you will need to determine whether it is available through York University Libraries. In some online databases/indexes, this information can be found at the bottom of each record. Otherwise, enter the title of the review article into OMNI, which will provide you with an online access link, or, the call number and location of the print version in the libraries (e.g., Scott, Frost, Steacie).
- Read more than one review in order to present a balanced assessment of your book, and be conscious of publication biases. Some review outlets are notorious for giving poor reviews to authors whose political or moral beliefs with which they disagree, which may skew the objectivity of the reviewer. Also note that some reviews are longer and more substantive such as in The New York Times, but other publications, such as library trade journals, including Library Journal, will only provide short reviews that do not go into a lot of depth.