Finding reviews of academic books?
score:5
Your question provides the basic response for books that are widely reviewed, however for books that are not widely reviewed:
Generally if a book hasn't been peer reviewed, that tells you all you need to know about the scholarly response to the work. Unless the book is in your sub-discipline and problem area it is discardable. Textbooks, for example, regularly go without review unless they're of importance.
Finding reviews in History, however, isn't simple. The journal oligopoly poorly indexes historical reviews, often merely indexing them as "Book Review" or "Book Review, XXX" covering all the reviews in that issue. The only certain way (given the poor quality of deep text searching in the oligopolists' archives) is by checking issues for two years after publication. Journal by journal.
Upvote:3
For academic books that have reviews (rather than reviews of any academic book) a good informal starting point is Danny Yee's book reviews. He is a perceptive autodidact who in over 20 years has built up an impressive corpus of approx. 1,200 book reviews on many subjects. I am e.g. inspired by what he shares on books covering China and Chinese history.
Upvote:5
- Do not underestimate amazon's user reviews. One must exercise caution and Quellenforschung there, of course, because some of the reviews are written by bigots and ignoramuses; others are written by good people who were perhaps looking for a different kind of book. Nevertheless, there is a lot of useful information there.
- For ancient and medieval subjects, Bryn Mawr has great academic reviews which a simple google scholar with the name of the book + Bryn Mawr review will usually bring up.
- Looking up citations in Google Scholar can sometimes help to evaluate a book as well.
More post
- 📝 Middle east and North africa population during the high middle ages
- 📝 What was the role of the college of consuls in Ancient Rome?
- 📝 What is the evidence for North Korean famine of 1990s?
- 📝 Why was the massive Human Wave attack used in WWI?
- 📝 Why did the ancient Romans use groups of eight?
- 📝 Has the US Congress's power to declare war been rendered superfluous by recent conflicts?
- 📝 Why was World War I ended on Nov 11 11:00, rather than immediately upon signing the armistice?
- 📝 Why are there no photorealistic paintings from the old days?
- 📝 What was the church's attitude to "magic" prior to the 15th century?
- 📝 How much did King George III of Britain weigh?
- 📝 Did Jaques Chirac say “Without Africa, France will slide down into the rank of a third [rate] power”?
- 📝 Why did Europeans and Asian countries develop much faster than African countries
- 📝 Were kamikaze pilots an effective strategy for Japan?
- 📝 Why did the Spanish government award a decoration to Chiang Kai-Shek?
- 📝 Was an uppercase j used to replace an uppercase i letter on German monument inscriptions?
- 📝 Can anyone help me identify this coin?
- 📝 Were any of the historical figures of the American Civil War close at West Point?
- 📝 In what year did Charles Proteus Steinmetz fix Ford's Generator for the famed $10,000 invoice?
- 📝 Who was the real first president of the United states of america?
- 📝 Was the tide of war ever turned by a wonder weapon?
- 📝 When did the Luftwaffe lose air-superiority over the Reich?
- 📝 How did people and goods move between East Pakistan and West Pakistan?
- 📝 How can I identify this silver kitchen fork?
- 📝 How did the Allies communicate during World War II?
- 📝 What is this symbol in red box?
- 📝 What weapon systems have come and gone very quickly?
- 📝 Did Japan have any continental colonies before modern times?
- 📝 Economic status of whites in the US South at the height of slavery?
- 📝 Why and how did climate change affect the Mayan civilization?
- 📝 Why were submarines not made sound proof?
Source: stackoverflow.com
Search Posts
Related post
- 📝 Finding reviews of academic books?
- 📝 How were books published in Ancient Greece?
- 📝 How did the monks whose job was to copy books react to Gutenberg's printing press?
- 📝 When did books first become affordable to the general population?
- 📝 Did foreign language phrase books exist in the ancient world?
- 📝 What was the policy on academic research being published beyond the iron curtain?
- 📝 Real-life examples of finding long-lost treasure?
- 📝 Would the original readers of Lewis Carroll's books have made connections between the experiences in the books and drug use?
- 📝 Why do all my history books divide Chinese history after the Han dynasty?
- 📝 Origin of the idea of a series of books
- 📝 Where are the ancient books now?
- 📝 What is the current academic consensus on Charlemagne's genealogy?
- 📝 Historical, academic explanations for the near-universal second-class citizenship of women?
- 📝 Books on the history of modern China for pleasure reading?
- 📝 Since when and why do some academic publishers use, prefer or enforce endnotes instead of footnotes
- 📝 Help on finding out about a sword
- 📝 How does finding a Franklin ship change what we know about the expedition?
- 📝 When did Walter Benjamin say "We collect books in the belief that we are preserving them when in fact it is the books that preserve their collector"?
- 📝 Was the reign of Galba covered in the missing books of Tacitus' Annals?
- 📝 Are there any books solely about the Umayyad Invasion of Gaul?
- 📝 When did the Portuguese decide to extend their West African exploration to finding a sea passage to India?
- 📝 Was Nazi Germany still burning books in 1935?
- 📝 How objective are books like "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind"? How are they "proven"?
- 📝 Differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the books of Moses
- 📝 How long were books in ancient times?
- 📝 How widely accepted are Tolstoy's views on history within the academic community?
- 📝 Autobiographical books about the Atlantic war for WWII from the allied perspective
- 📝 What were pre-internet stock books called?
- 📝 Are there any universally accepted or non-Abrahamic based books in history that have mentions of longevity of prophets?
- 📝 Are there any good books in English about the mechanics of German reunification?