At Choice, we sometimes describe our mission as telling folks about the “good stuff.”  And that, by and large, is what we do.  Each month, book in hand, the Choice editors carefully select and assign to reviewers the most promising of the recently received titles.  Typically only 25 percent of all titles submitted, roughly 7,500 out of 25,000, survive this highly selective, initial screening process.  The remaining titles are “rejected” after review by one or more Choice subject editors.

To be sure, many titles are “rejected” for nonqualitative reasons.  The most common of these reasons is “out of scope,” meaning that the title doesn’t meet one or more of the relevant criteria outlined in our selection policy, chief among which are that it must be appropriate for undergraduates and complement the undergraduate curriculum.  (For more details, see http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/selectionpolicy.)

Given these odds, publishers and authors are usually delighted to hear their title has been selected for review.  Nor is this enthusiasm totally misguided.  This past year, for example, of 7,264 reviews published by Choice, some 6,818, or 93.9 percent, were rated as Recommended, Highly Recommended, or Essential.  The most common rating was Recommended, accounting for 3,879 or 53.4 percent of all new reviews, followed by Highly Recommended at 2,543, or 35 percent.  By contrast, only 396 titles (5.5 percent of those reviewed in 2011) received the most coveted rating, Essential.

On average, therefore, most Choice reviews are positive, as well they might be.  It is not Choice’s mission to expend scarce editorial and publishing resources generating a long list of titles that libraries should avoid purchasing, and that students should avoid reading.  That isn’t what our subscribers need, and that isn’t what we are about.

That said, it is inherent in the reviewing process that some reviews come back negative, and when they do, we typically publish them.  This past year, for example, Choice published 296 reviews with an Optional rating and 142 with the dreaded rating of Not Recommended.  Together, these accounted for just 6.1 percent of the reviews published by Choice in calendar year 2011, with Not Recommended reviews representing fewer than 2 percent of the total (1.954846 percent to be exact).

Should Choice publish these reviews?  We think so.  There certainly is an argument to be made against publication of negative reviews, and some totally respectable review sources—our sister publication, Booklist, being a prime example—have such a policy.  At Choice, however, we early on concluded that it is better to publish such reviews.  If nothing else, they serve as a reality check, a reminder that the outcome of the book review process is not and cannot be preordained if that process is being properly conducted.

We recognize too that when assigning titles to reviewers, we are asking for their honest opinion of the work, and they in turn expect us to respond appropriately, even if that opinion is critical or negative.  Unsurprisingly, it turns out that in the collective opinion of our reviewers, not all titles selected by the Choice editors are above average, a level of perfection we continue to strive for but have not yet achieved.  Maybe next year.