Book Review Digest

Printed monthly with annual compendia, it digests American and English periodicals from 1905 to the present day.

Before the Internet, Book Review Digest was a significant reference tool and bibliographic aid used by the American public and librarians alike to find current literature.

During the 20th century, Book Review Digest was a common American library bibliographic aid for the public to find current literature.

[2] Beginning in 1905, the H. W. Wilson Company issued Book Review Digest monthly, with cumulative compilations.

[2] Each book's bibliographic entry is introduced with a noncritical description,[2] annotating discrete features with no assessment of quality.

Plus and minus symbols indicate the review's favorability, if apparent, letting readers quickly summarize critical consensus towards the book.

At the time of their launch in the mid-2000s,[10][11] Retrospective compiled 1.5 million reviews from over 500 English-language publications on 300,000 books published between 1905 and 1982.

The equivalent of Book Review Digest's first 78 annual cumulative volumes, Retrospective replaced 14 linear feet of reference material.

[10] At its launch, Plus compiled over a million reviews from thousands of periodicals on 700,000 books published from 1983 through the present day.

Updated daily, it also pulled reviews from other Wilson periodical databases, including Readers' Guide Full Text.

[12] While Book Review Digest had been available in some form on EBSCOhost, OCLC, and SilverPlatter platforms as early as July 2003, Plus was exclusive to WilsonWeb.