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Full Text
RR 2003/224
Book Review Digest Plus
H.W. Wilson
Bronx, NY
2002 to date
URL: http://www.hwwilson.com
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Last visited February 2003
Keywords Book publishing, Literature
Review DOI 10.1108/09504120310480779
Book Review Digest Plus (BRD+) contains all of the content from H.W. Wilson's traditional Book Review Digest database (1983-present) and adds to it book reviews from 11 of Wilson's other indexes, covering arts, sciences, social sciences, business and the humanities. The expanded database now includes citations to more than one million reviews for over 700,000 books. In addition to the review citations, the database contains excerpts from over 129,000 reviews (as in the original Book Review Digest), as well as bibliographical records for books themselves. The existence of the book records allows citations for a given book to be grouped together, which is a great advantage to the searcher.
There are a few oddities in the content of the database. As of the time of review, there are some bibliographic records that are not actually associated with review citations. Hopefully, these are temporary gaps resulting from the fact that a book entry must exist before its attendant review entries may be input. It should be noted, however, that some such books remained review-less throughout the several weeks of this reviewer's investigation. Additionally, some review citations appear more than once, often having one entry with a review excerpt and another without. This doubtless results from the integration of reviews from multiple databases; it is not particularly troublesome, but the database would benefit from the removal of these duplicates. Of greater concern is the fact that while some of the book reviews from various Wilson databases are included in BRD+, not all reviews are present. This means that the thorough user will still need to check the others for more reviews, despite all of the additional content in this database. It is unclear if there is a pattern to the exclusions. The inclusion of reviews from...