The publishing landscape is changing rapidly. AI-generated books, self-published titles, and automated reprints of public-domain material are increasingly appearing alongside traditionally published books.

Some of these are legitimate publications, but many others are of poor or inconsistent quality. They may have limited editorial oversight, unreliable metadata, poor formatting, or production quality, or offer little added value compared with content already freely available.

The growing number of such publications can create significant challenges for title selection and collection development, particularly when large quantities of titles enter the market without the editorial and quality-control processes traditionally associated with professional publishing.

To help our customers identify these publications more easily, we have introduced an “Uncertain relevance publisher” tag on our website. The tag identifies titles from publishers whose output we believe warrants additional scrutiny when making selection decisions.

The tag is intended to support informed selection rather than automatically exclude individual titles. We continuously monitor developments in the publishing market and regularly review and update the publishers covered by the tag.