The MLA Literary Research Guide says: "YWMLS is the single most comprehensive evaluative survey of scholarship on European and Latin American languages and literatures.

Taken together, the annual volumes offer an incomparable record of scholarly and critical trends as well as of the fluctuations of academic reputations of literary works and authors.

In total about 75 such surveys are written by scholars traditionally based mainly in Britain, but increasingly also around Europe and North America.

In 2016, YWMLS was purchased by Brill (Leiden), and the general editorship passed to Paul Scott (Kansas) and Graeme Dunphy (Würzburg).

As the development of internet resources made it easier for scholars to find new titles, the need for comprehensive bibliographical listings waned somewhat, and the focus of the work became more strongly evaluative.