Skip to Main Content

Scholarly Credentials Toolkit for Spanish and Portuguese Faculty

Selected tools for evaluating academic productivity in the disciplines of Spanish and Portuguese literature and linguistics

WorldCat

Use WorldCat to compile a list of libraries that own the book in question. WorldCat gives the truest indication of the total number of owning libraries. Search by author, title, or ISBN (unique book number). Look for "Libraries Worldwide" in the bibliographic record. The list of owning libraries can be emailed or printed for later analysis.

Google Scholar and Google Scholar Citations

Google Scholar incorporates a cited reference search that is upending our traditional reliance upon Web of Science. No comprehensive analysis of an author's corpus can afford to overlook Google Scholar. Look for "Cited by X" in the relevant citation of the Google Scholar results list. Note that Google Scholar is the best tool for analyzing the impact of a book or a book chapter as opposed to a journal article. Traditionally it has been very difficult if not impossible to analyze the impact of a book, so this is a valuable feature of Google Scholar.

Like the more traditional Web of Science, Google Scholar Citations tracks citations to scholarly publications. But unlike WOS, Google Scholar Citations tracks a range of scholarly works from conference proceedings to books. It is easy to create a Google Scholar profile, which you have the option to make public, to showcase your scholarly publications and citations of those works.

Book Reviews: The Basics

MLA International Bibliography (MLA), JSTOR, and ProjectMuse can all be extremely useful for finding scholarly book reviews, as can the interdisciplinary database Academic Search Complete. These databases cover, in addition to book reviews, scholarly journal articles, dissertations, editorials, and speeches, so you will likely wish to limit your results to book reviews. Unfortunately, no designated book review field exists in MLA, but the phrase "review article" is often used in a record's subject field for this purpose. It is easy to limit your search to "Reviews" in JSTOR.

The following is a dedicated book review databases:

Book Reviews: Next Steps

A more complete list of book review sources available through Temple University Libraries: