This may be an odd place to put such documentation, but with a search appliance in the house, what does it matter.
I'm tired of having to relearn how to find book reviews in Web of Science, so I thought I'd finally write down how to do this. I originally wrote this post in July 2007, but then the nice people at Thomson ISI revamped the WoS interface, making it even harder to use their tool to find book reviews in my humble opinion. Here are the revised instructions:
- use the Advanced Search (ugh, now you have to know how to type a complex query)
- put some keywords from the title of the reviewed title in the search box; you must put ti= in front of each one and connect them with 'and' (e.g.- ti=prague and ti=territories), or put part of the title in quotes after ti, e.g.- ti="tour de france a cultural" (note: this need not be the complete title, but it must be an exact string).
- at the bottom of the search form, set the restriction in the righthand box to Book Review
That's it. If you're lucky, you'll find more reviews here than you will in such flimsy and expensive titles as Book Review Digest and Book Review Index, which both largely ignore reviews in academic journals and mainly list only those in the popular press.
This is not the only way to do this in the new Web of Science interface, but I do believe it is the most direct.
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