[1] The survey, in the form of an encyclopedia, is important as a comprehensive, multivolume treatment of the vascular plants, with keys to and descriptions of all families and genera, mostly by specialists in those groups.
The Kubitzki system served as the basis for classification in Mabberley's Plant-Book, a dictionary of the vascular plants.
[2] Mabberley states, in his Introduction on page xi of the 2008 edition, that the Kubitzki system "has remained the standard to which other literature is compared".
By 2010, there were nine published volumes, covering 39 of the 59 orders of flowering plants that are recognized in the APG III system.
Since the first volume was published in 1990, a great deal has been learned about plant taxonomy, mostly by phylogenetic analysis of DNA sequences.