So, your professor wants you to locate a book review for a class assignment and you aren't sure where to start. This guide will steer you in the proper direction and get you off and running in no time.

The Library maintains a print publication titled the Book Review Digest. This publication is produced annually and contains a great many reviews for books published during that year. It is located on the first floor of the Library in the Reference Collection, on the south side of the building facing King Street. The call number is Z1219 .C96:

In order to use the Book Review Digest, you must know the year that your book was published. Once you know the publication year, then select the volume for that year. You will need to search for your book by the author's last name. The books which are reviewed are arranged by the author's last name. The authors names will appear alphabetically.

In addition to using the Book Review Digest, you may use a number of the Library's subscription databases to search for book reviews. The key to using a database to locate a book review is to use a limiter to instruct the database to perform a search for book reviews only. Let us use the example of Academic Search Premier to illustrate this process. From the Library's Main Database Page, scroll down and select the link for Academic Search Premier:

Once you are on the main search page for Academic Search Premier, scroll down until you see the drop down menu named Document type and then select "Book review" as shown in the figure below:

After setting the Document type limiter to "Book review," scroll back up to the top and enter your search terms into the search box and hit the search button. For this example, we will use Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner:

The next screen that appears will be a list of citations for different book reviews that originate from a variety of publications. You will need to examine these citations carefully and judge for yourself whether or not the book review may be useful to you. You may also need to jump to the next page of results if the first page does not contain a helpful review. If you see links at the bottom of the citation that say HTML Full Text or PDF Full Text, then you will have the full text of that book review. Simply click on the link to access the book review:

The next screen will reveal the full text of the book review:

You may print or e-mail the book review to yourself at this point, as shown in the figure above.

You will probably notice that some citations do not contain HTML or PDF full text links, but will have a link that says Check Article Linker for more information:

This indicates that the present database does not have the full text of the book review, but that another one of the Library's subscription databases may contain the full text. Click on that link to see if another Library database does have the review. The next screen will look something like this:

If you see a link on the page that says Article, as seen above, then another Library database contains the book review. Click on the Article link to enter the other database and gain access to the book review. The next screen may look something like this:

Click on the title link to access the book review, which should appear in the next screen:

Many of the other Library databases function in the same manner as Academic Search Premier. The key is to look for a menu on the database's main search page that will permit you to limit your search to a particular type of document, in this case a book review. You might need to do some detective work to find the limiting option. Look at the main search page for Proquest, for example:

There is no immediately visible option that allows you to limit a search. However, if you click on the link for More Search Options, you will then be presented with the opportunity to limit your search to a book review:

Now you are ready to proceed with a search in the same manner as shown above with Academic Search Premier.

If you have any questions about about how to locate a book review, please feel free to stop by the Reference Desk on the first floor the Library, call 819-6331, or e-mail us at library@flagler.edu, and ask for help from a librarian. We are here to help you!