Reviews are an important aspect of scholarly discussion because they help filter out which works are relevant in the yearly flood of publications and are thus influential in determining how a work is received. The IBR, published again since 1971 as an interdisciplinary, international bibliography of reviews, it is a unique source of bibliographical information. The database contains entries on over 1.2 million book reviews of literature dealing primarily with the humanities and social sciences published in 6,820, mainly European scholarly journals. Reviews of more than 560,000 scholarly works are listed. The database increases every year by 60,000 entries.

Every entry contains the following information:

On the work reviewed: author, title
On the review: reviewer, periodical (year, edition, page, ISSN), language, subject area (in German, English, Italian)
Publisher, address of journal