In a world of continuously proliferating sources of information, finding and recognizing reliable information has become harder than ever before. Misinformation is rampant—particularly online—with the rise of social media, user-generated content ‘databases’, fuzzy facts, and false narratives. 

When BBC Future Now interviewed a panel of 50 experts in early 2017 about the “grand challenges we face in the 21st century”, many named the breakdown of trusted information sources as one of the most pressing problems.

As a result, it has never been more important for consumers, students, researchers, and others seeking information to ensure that they are accessing accurate data from reliable sources. To that end, the reference publishers featured here go to great lengths to ensure that the titles and databases they offer are accurate, free of bias, and genuine. 

But for many of these publishers, their work is not just about providing trustworthy materials but also about educating users how to discern credible information sources from dubious ones. In fact, ‘vetting the vetted’ is baked into their missions. 

“Information literacy is at the heart of our major products,” says Paula Krebs, Modern Language Association’s executive director. “All … of them are about information literacy and telling true from false, legitimate from illegitimate, understanding where the information comes from and sharing that information with the person you’re trying to communicate with.”

Nichole Ridgeway, director of institutional marketing at the American Psychological Association, adds, “A lot of librarians use PsycInfo as a training ground for how to conduct research because it helps move students to more authoritative sources and not just rely on Google Scholar or even just a Google search.”

Read on to discover more about how reference publishers are safeguarding the information we access. 

American Psychological Association - Database Resources

While APA may be best known for its APA Style guide—highlighted later in this section—its databases are equally renowned resources, spanning the breadth and depth of psychology to support the needs of researchers, educators, clinicians, and students.

APA PsycInfo, which recently celebrated its 55th anniversary, started in print, migrated to CD-ROM, and is now available online via subscription. A trusted abstracting and indexing database designed to start the search process, APA PsycInfo includes more than 5.4 million records across all of APA’s electronic resources, covering the full spectrum of behavioral and social sciences. It cites more than 2,400 journals and 3,000 books and includes research in more than 30 languages in more than 50 countries. 

“It’s really the pinnacle of indexing and abstracting services,” says Nichole Ridgeway, APA’s director of institutional marketing. Updated twice a week, all the entries in APA PsycInfo have been peer-reviewed and selected by psychology experts.

As a single source of vetted, authoritative research, PsycInfo is one of the most frequently accessed online psychological search services. Predominantly used by undergraduates, graduate students, and other researchers, it offers not only access to extensive information but also search options that narrow results to the most relevant ones.

APA has been adding new features to PsycInfo that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to help users with their research process, specifically “to help monitor trends in their areas and explore content analytics,” explains Ridgeway. For example, a citation mapper visually illustrates the relationships of bibliographic records via a graphical display of cited documents as well as citing documents of a particular record that a researcher selects, allowing researchers to see all the interconnections of citations within a specific bibliographic record. Ridgeway explains it as “researching the research.” 

APA PsycArticles is a database of 199 journals published by APA and partner societies such as Hogrefe Publishing Group, the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Educational Publishing Foundation, with content dating back to the 1890s. PsycArticles provides the full text of the articles for users interested in reading beyond a citation. 

The newest APA database is PsycTherapy, a streaming video platform designed to train new psychologists in clinical and counseling programs. “These are authentic therapy sessions that allow trainees to see how to apply a therapeutic approach,” says Ridgeway. PsycTherapy includes more 900 videos covering more than 100 therapy approaches and over 245 different topics. Users can search by therapeutic approach, topic, or even specific therapist. APA has recently added content that features telehealth therapy.

PsycTests is a database of tests designed for psychological research. Rather than develop a test from scratch, researchers can search thousands of tests and download them for their research. These can be questionnaires, rating scales, surveys, test batteries—PsycTests contains a wide range of test methodologies.

All APA databases are hosted on four platforms: APA’s proprietary APA PsycNet, as well as EBSCO, Ovid, and ProQuest.

Another electronic offering is not a research product, but rather a writing platform called Academic Writer, which teaches users how to write scholarly papers in APA Style. This “institutional product… helps students develop long-lasting writing skills that they can carry on not just through their college career” but continue to use to “build a strong writing foundation that’s important to any career,” says Ridgeway. 

RIPM 

For music historians and lovers of music alike, experiencing musical history through contemporary eyes is captivating, and provides a richer, more fully contextualized understanding of this art form. 

Primary sources such as articles and reviews published in music periodicals are the essential windows into this history. There were more than 7,000 music journals and periodicals published worldwide between 1760 and 1966; however, many of these sources are rare or hard to find. 

Founded in 1980, RIPM (Le Repertoire international de la presse musicale) is a nonprofit organization that aims to digitize these periodicals and make them easily accessible within online databases. Sponsored by the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres, RIPM makes available nearly 2 million pages from more than 600 music periodicals in 20 world languages to date.

Searching these materials gives users access to “a daily chronicle of music history that includes granular information as well as a much bigger-picture view,” says Executive Editor Benjamin Knysak.

For instance, users can find a review of the first published version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. They can find illustrations of the original staging for Verdi operas, as well as sketches of the composer Igor Stravinsky drawn by Pablo Picasso. They can read firsthand accounts of performances by musicians such as virtuoso violinist Niccolò Pagaini or composer and pianist George Gershwin.

“It’s a wonderful way for people to connect with music history,” Knysak says. Target users include performers, music historians, musicologists, and music educators.
                        
There are three versions of RIPM’s music history collections on EBSCOhost: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (1760–-1966) is searchable by article title, author, and content annotations; Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals with Full Text is fully keyword searchable throughout the full text of articles; and the Preservation Series: European and North American Music Periodicals is not manually indexed but remains full-text searchable. Together, these resources allow users access to more than 200 years of musical history simply and efficiently.

Like Google Books and HathiTrust, the RIPM Preservation Series does not identify specific types of content, such as reviews, illustrations, or analysis. However, it does offer a simple downloading process for saving and printing. It also allows users to make personal observations in a Notes field, and it supplies bibliographic information on each journal page that is viewed.

By purchasing an annual subscription, academic and public libraries can give their patrons full access to any combination of these databases. Access is available through RIPM’s own platform, RIPMPlus, or through the EBSCOhost platform for libraries that are EBSCO customers. (Users who access these collections through EBSCOhost can take advantage of the enhanced search features embedded within that platform, such as citation assistance and mobile-friendly access.) A free, 30-day trial period is available.

In addition to these general music history databases, RIPM also offers a unique collection of American jazz periodicals. “We’re the first ones to bring this rich and growing collection to a global audience,” Knysak says. The RIPM Jazz Collection is currently available on the RIPMPlus platform. It will be available on EBSCOHost in early 2024. 

Modern Language Association 

Best known for its MLA Handbook—the descendant of 1951’s original MLA Style Sheet—the Modern Language Association (MLA) is a 21,000-member-strong professional association for researchers and faculty in the fields of language, literature, writing, and culture. The organization’s Scholarly Communications Department publishes about 16 to 18 books a year, and the journal of the MLA—PMLA—which launched in 1884, is the organization’s flagship publication for literary and language studies. 

The association also publishes three major reference resources. Its biggest seller is the MLA Handbook, 9th Edition, April 2021, ISBN 9781603293518 (Paperback), ISBN 9781603295628 (Spiral), ISBN 9781603295611 (Hardcover). While MLA Style is a set of guidelines for formatting scholarly papers and citing sources, it’s designed to be more a teaching aid than a formatting guide. “We really see it as a way for students to evaluate sources,” says MLA Executive Director Paula Krebs. “Not to start from a citation, but to start from thinking about a source as a source. Is it a credible source? How do you know what the original source of it is, who wrote it, and then who published it?” 

“Regardless of what students go on to do academically or professionally, MLA Style is meant to instill a sense of source literacy and responsibility to the audience and to stand as a foundation for future applications of style or public communication,” adds Angela Gibson, MLA’s director of scholarly communication.

With this edition of MLA Handbook, the MLA launched the MLA Handbook Plus in June 2021, a subscription-based online publication that supplements the print edition. “It makes MLA style and all the pedagogical apparatus that makes up the handbook—which is a real teaching tool and not just a reference manual—available to any student at a college or university that subscribes to Handbook Plus,” says Krebs. “So, students don’t have to spend $20 for their own copy.”

More than a reference guide, the MLA Handbook also offers quizzes, examples, and exercises, and the online edition includes additional educational materials, including video content. 

The MLA International Bibliography is a database of all publications in language, literary, linguistic, folklore, cultural studies, and writing studies fields. Internal and external bibliographers prepare abstracts and indexes of all new journal articles and other publications, adding about 75,000 entries a year. Subscription-based, it is primarily used by university and college libraries, as well as research-oriented public libraries. A subscription to the Bibliography also includes access to the MLA Directory of Periodicals and the MLA Bibliography Thesaurus. The Bibliography is hosted by EBSCO, which serves as the MLA’s distributor. 

Another publication, complementing the other three reference resources and furthering the MLA’s mission to help students understand how to choose credible sources, is The Guide to Digital Literacy Second Edition, Ellen C. Carillo, 2022, ISBN 9781603296052 (Paperback). This best-selling classroom guide helps students understand why digital literacy is so important and provides them with the tools to find and evaluate reliable sources.

More information about MLA style can be found at http://style/mla.org.

Gale 

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Gale’s “Eighteenth Century Collections Online” (ECCO), the largest collection—32 million pages—of 18th-century books, pamphlets, periodicals, and other ephemera in the world. ECCO was revolutionary in providing researchers and students a text-searchable corpus at their desktops 24/7.

The origins of ECCO lie in the microfilm series, The Eighteenth Century, which from 1982 published facsimile images of 18th-century books based on the British Library’s recently created machine-readable English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC). Books were filmed at 20 libraries in the UK, Ireland, and US, notably the British Library, the Bodleian, Harvard, National Library of Scotland, and Cambridge University.

The goal was to “include every significant monograph published between 1701 and 1800 in the English language, and every significant monograph in any language printed in the British Empire during that period,” says Julia de Mowbray, publisher at Gale. “Also, all first editions published in the 18th century and all variant editions” were included.

In the mid-1990s, libraries started digitizing their collections, often from microfilm surrogates. Gale’s first digital archive, the Times Literary Supplement Centenary Archive, was published in 1999, and in 2000, Gale started digitizing “The Eighteenth Century” microfilms, creating ECCO. The interface was designed with the book reader in mind. 

ECCO was published in seven subject modules over 2003-2004, with a supplement in 2010. The biggest portion of ECCO is the subject module Literature and Language, comprising 28 percent of all entries, followed by Religion & Philosophy (24 percent) and History & Geography (16 percent).  

A major source library for ECCO and a major user of the database is the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. “It is widely used for teaching undergraduates,” says Sarah Wheale, head of Rare Books at Weston Library (Bodleian Libraries). “ECCO was transformative because it takes [the collection] into the classroom remotely.”

Optical character recognition (OCR) software captured the materials on the microfilm not as static images, but as actual text. This fact, along with the addition of ESTC metadata, made ECCO a more valuable resource as users could search all the texts by a wide variety of criteria. “You could search across multiple texts or all the text in the database,” says de Mowbray. 

“They also indexed the back matter—these are early printed indexes,“ adds Isabel Holowaty, deputy head of Humanities Libraries at the Bodleian Libraries. “The fact that they are separately searchable in ECCO I think is fantastic.”

More than 500 institutions worldwide—public and academic libraries, as well as some schools—have access to ECCO. Responding to new research methods is the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, an environment for text and data mining that enables users to do textual analysis; ECCO is one of its most heavily used data sets.

Other ECCO users have seen it transform learning experiences. According to an article in The History Teacher (Vol. 51, No.4), East Carolina University’s Professor Timothy Jenks found that online materials like ECCO enhanced student understanding of 18th-century life, while another in The Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, 2009, describes how West Chester University’s Dr. Eleanor Shevlinat had her students search “coffee houses” for one class project—and the works that ECCO found showed the important role coffee houses played in 18th-century culture.

Grey House Publishing 

Founded 43 years ago and based in Amenia, NY, Grey House Publishing releases nearly 150 authoritative reference titles a year, designed for public libraries, colleges, and high schools. Across several imprints, titles are single- and multivolume reference works that help readers research a topic and develop a deeper understanding of it. Topics include history, literature, science, health, careers, business information, statistics, financial literacy, and more.

In 2020, Grey House launched its “Health & Wellness” series with the Dementia Handbook, and the series has grown to nearly a dozen titles since. Designed for consumer reference—and to help counter health misinformation that’s rampant online—these handbooks give readers trusted, in-depth information about specific health topics, offer self-diagnostic tools, and provide necessary resources for support and treatment. “Public librarians like this series because it has resources and good medical overviews of conditions and various subsets of those illnesses,” says Leslie Mackenzie Gottlieb, president and publisher. “We keep the language very accessible. One of our key missions is accessibility of accurate information.”

Coming this fall is the Depression Handbook & Resource Guide, October 2023, ISBN 9781637005644. Like other entries in this series, the first section contains studies and statistics about depression in general, as well as a self-analysis guide, followed by a section covering common comorbidities—anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, suicide, and the like. The guide then provides resources for specific depressive disorders—associations, foundations, research centers, support groups, print resources, and websites. “Someone can look for materials on depression broadly, or users who are looking for comorbidities of depression can drill down to find anxiety-related orders or trauma- and stress-related disorders, for example,” says Gottlieb. As with all titles in this series, purchasers of the print edition also get access to a searchable online electronic edition of the guide, reachable from the library or remotely.

Forthcoming titles in this series include Chronic Pain Handbook & Resource Guide, February 2024, ISBN 9781637008157, and Adolescent Mental Health Handbook & Resource Guide, July 2024, ISBN 9781637008430.  Another popular series is “Opinions Throughout History,” launched in 2018. Currently, there are 20 titles in the series, with four more to come. The books are designed to answer the question, “How did we get here?” Each title focuses on a specific topic, provides the history of that topic, and chronicles how opinion around it has evolved through a well-balanced selection of original documents and easy-to-understand analysis. “We’ve been wrestling with many of these social issues as long as the country’s been around,” says Gottlieb. “That was the basis of this series, the historical perspective that these issues—which are so polarizing today—have always been with us, and different times have responded to them in different ways.”

On the docket is The Supreme Court, September 2023, ISBN 9781637005613. A decidedly divisive institution today, the Court has always been controversial. Starting with the origins of the Supreme Court, the book chronologically follows the development of the Court, each chapter dedicated to a specific Court. It employs original documents as a jumping-off point—court decisions, speeches, newspaper and magazine articles, government documents, and other primary sources. Heavily illustrated, the book makes these topics accessible to public library users, as well as to high school and university students. 
Other titles coming in this series include Truth & Lies in the Media, January 2024, ISBN 9781637008126, Domestic Terrorism, April 2024, ISBN 9781637008294, and Refugees & Asylum Seekers, September 2024, ISBN 9781637008522. 

The popular “Critical Insights” series from the Salem Press imprint offers literary criticism of classic and contemporary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Seven titles are released per year, each focusing on a particular author, work, or theme, edited to help develop students’ critical-thinking skills. Recent titles are Sense and Sensibility, July 2023, ISBN 9781637004388, Ralph Waldo Emerson, August 2023, ISBN 9781637004401, and All the Pretty Horses, September 2023, ISBN 9781637004364. Forthcoming titles include Twelfth Night, or What You Will, January 2024, ISBN 9781637007280, and Crime and Punishment, February 2024, ISBN 9781637007303. 

The “Defining Documents” series provides in-depth analysis of the most important documents that have defined both American and world history in the context of a broad topic. Each title offers an overview of relevant documents, detailed document analyses, and a discussion of essential themes. Four titles are added each year. The two-volume Revolutions, September 2023, ISBN 9781637004043, is the most recent addition. Each chapter focuses on one specific revolution, starting with the Dutch Revolt in 1566, then the English, American, and French Revolutions, continuing through the 19th and 20th centuries. Volume II ends with the Arab Spring of the early 2010s. 

Other soon-to-be-released titles are Workers’ Rights, October 2023, ISBN 9781637004081, Religious Freedom & Religious Persecution, January 2024, ISBN 9781637007563, and Treason, February 2024, ISBN 9781637007600. All are two-volume sets. The Reference Shelf,” from the H.W. Wilson imprint, is a subscription-based series published six times a year, designed to help students and researchers explore contemporary topics in depth. Each 200-page volume collects 35–45 articles and documents about a topic currently in the news. Coverage is balanced, logically organized, and supplemented with explanatory background materials and resources. Readers come away from each issue with a better understanding of the topic, its history, current concerns, and future implications. 

Upcoming issues of “The Reference Shelf” include Gene Editing & Genetic Engineering, October 2023, ISBN 9781637004982, and Representative American Speeches, 2022–2023, December 2023, ISBN 9781637004999. Issues to be published in 2024 include Russia & Ukraine, February 2024, ISBN 9781637008942, and New Developments in Artificial Intelligence, April 2024, ISBN 9781637008959. Also published by H.W. Wilson is “Core Collections.” First launched in the 1920s, this indispensable resource for librarians highlights thousands of essential and highly recommended books to help with collection development and readers’ advisory services. A board of consulting librarians creates the lists of titles to be added to the collections and those to weed out. As the number of book bans grows, inclusion in a “Core Collection” title is strong support for any challenged purchase.

“Core Collections” are available in seven categories: Fiction, Nonfiction, Children’s, Middle & Junior, Senior High, Young Adult Fiction, and Graphic Novels. Children’s Core Collection, 26th Edition, August 2023, ISBN 9781637005095, was just published. Updates coming soon include Middle & Junior High Core Collection, 16th Edition, November 2023, ISBN 9781637005101, and Fiction Core Collection, 22nd Edition, June 2024, ISBN 9781637007266. “These are war horses,” says Gottlieb. “They’ve been around a long time, and librarians can be very attached to them.”

Bloomsbury 

London-based Bloomsbury began as a trade publisher in the 1980s and launched its academic division in 2008, which publishes a handful of major reference works each year in print and/or digital formats. Now focused on building out their digital offerings, the company initially launched digital platforms and products that they felt would meet a market need. 

But over time, says Kathryn Earle, managing director of Bloomsbury’s Digital Resources Division, “it’s become clear to us that our real successes tend to happen when we’re building up what we call ‘deep verticals.’” Bloomsbury defines a “deep vertical” as “a subject area where we have real depth of content.” For example, Bloomsbury is particularly strong in the visual and performing arts, fashion, theology and religion, and history. 

This fall, Bloomsbury is launching three major digital projects, which comprise a variety of platforms and products. (The company defines a platform as a technology solution that hosts different products and a product as a database that can be purchased independently.) 

Bloomsbury Visual Arts (BVA) is a digital platform, or “hub,” that comprises 13 products. In addition to some older products such as Bloomsbury Design Library (June 2017, migrated to BVA hub March 2023), Bloomsbury Applied Visual Arts (October 2018, migrated to BVA hub March 2023), and Bloomsbury International Encyclopedia of Surrealism (July 2020, migrated to BVA hub March 2023), the company has added 10 more products to the BVA hub.  

Bloomsbury Art Markets, added to BVA in March 2023, is a new collection of article-based content centered around the commercial aspect of art, which rarely gets discussed but has played a highly influential role in shaping the history of art. “Dealers, galleries, and all of the other actors were absolutely critical in determining what was considered canonical, what was bought and sold, and what established artistic legacies,” says Earle. “What’s in our great museums was all very much reliant on these behind-the-scenes people.” In addition to those studying art history, this collection is an excellent resource to determine the provenance of pieces of art. Art historian and gallery owner Johannes Nathan is the editor in chief.

The Ceramics database, a September 2023 addition to BVA, contains book content from Bloomsbury’s Special Interest division. “It’s exciting because we have an [outstanding] ceramics list, and ceramics is an underrepresented area in the academy,” says Earle. Ceramics tends to get short shrift in the visual arts, possibly because it’s not as mainstream as photography or design. “We’re offering world-beating content that’s seeing a home for the first time within the academic community,” says Earle. Much of the content is very hands-on and how-to, targeted for people who want to learn ceramics. 

Other new collections recently added or coming to the BVA hub include Animation Practice (July 2023), Design Studies (August 2023), Photography (September 2023), Applied Gaming (September 2023), Printmaking (October 2023), and Packt Game Development and Animation (March 2024). 

The long-standing Bloomsbury Architecture Library is also migrating to the BVA hub in December 2023, owing to user demand. “The market research we did strongly supported [its inclusion],” says Earle. “Librarians want content, ideally, all in one place so that it’s discoverable and interoperable.” In 2021, the Bloomsbury Architecture Library won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award.

The “beating heart” of the Bloomsbury Architecture Library is the Sir Banister Fletcher Global History of Architecture, now in its 21st edition. Originally published in 1896, it is now available in ebook format licensed from the Royal Institute of British Architects. Its influence in the field of architecture has been profound, and Bloomsbury’s edition won the 2023 Architecture Book of the Year Award (Company of Architects), the Colvin Prize 2020 (Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain), and the 2020 Dartmouth Medal Honorable Mention.

Two additional architectural reference products—Vernacular Architecture and Global Women in Architecture—are slated to launch next year. 

Also launching this fall is the Bloomsbury Dress & Costume Library (BDCL) (October 2023), a new product on the Bloomsbury Fashion Central platform. “Costume” is defined as “clothes that change your identity”—and thus includes clothing worn in the theater, film, masquerades, and so forth. BDCL brings together classics of costume history, such as Norah Waugh’s Cut of Men’s Clothes and Cut of Women’s Clothes, as well as reference titles from Richard Corson’s classic “Fashions In” series, including Hair, Make-Up, and Eyeglasses. “It will have a high relevance for any school teaching fashion history or design, for costumiers and those studying costume design, as well as for curators,” says Earle. These classics are now available in digital format, along with other Bloomsbury titles on costume, video, and contextualizing articles.

“It [a resource like BDCL] is really important for dress historians, because when you’re looking at costume as it’s worn on the stage or in film, you have to have an understanding of what the original artifacts were, what they looked like, and how they were structured,” explains Earle. Historical dress and costume design also has applications for present-day fashion. Major fashion designers—big names like John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood, as well as up-and-coming designers—often draw on dress history to get inspiration for contemporary designs, making BDCL an invaluable resource.  

A new platform that launched in October 2022 is the Bloomsbury Video Library, which includes film and video collections primarily from small, independent filmmakers on a wide variety of topics. Examples include Intore (The Chosen), about indigenous dance in post-genocide Rwanda; The Renaissance of Mata Ortiz, an Emmy-winning documentary about art in a village in Mexico; Five Roads to Freedom, a documentary about reconciliation in post-apartheid South Africa; Matthew Bourne’s The Car Man: Bizet’s Carmen Re-imagined; and much more.

In January 2023, Bloomsbury also launched opera modules on its video platform, containing content from a range of partners including Glyndebourne and the Royal Opera in the UK, the Teatro Real in Spain, and the Dutch National Opera. The decision to add a video platform was also based on market research.

“Video is obviously an area where, according to a recent Ithaka survey, academic institutions are looking to increase their spending,” says Earle. “We think that’s because video is very student-friendly; students love videos rather than reading.”

American Psychological Association - Print Resources

The American Psychological Association (APA) publishes around 90 journals and periodicals and about 90 books per year. The APA also provides subscription-based databases such as PsycInfo, PsycArticles, and PsycTests and PsycTherapy, which offer demonstration videos for learning psychotherapy techniques. 

By far, the association’s best-known publication is the APA Style guide. Developed in 1929 as a set of standards for submitting manuscripts to APA publications, APA Style has become the leading source of guidance for students and researchers writing academic papers. “APA Style is rooted in the guiding principles of writing with clarity, precision, and inclusion, with the aim of helping writers achieve excellence in scholarly communication,” says Emily Ayubi, APA style director.

The first edition of the APA Style guide appeared in 1952 and the latest version, Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 7th Edition, October 2019, is available in spiralbound (ISBN 9781433832178), hardcover (ISBN 9781433832154), paperback (ISBN 9781433832161), and ebook (ISBN 9781433832185) versions.

APA Style has been adopted across all academic disciplines and internationally, and its currently available in seven languages: English, traditional and simplified Chinese, Greek, Turkish, Spanish, and Korean.

There are around 1.6 million copies of the English language version of the 7th edition in circulation. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 47% of college majors require APA style.

Complementing the Publication Manual is the Concise Guide to APA Style, 7th Edition, December 2019, available in spiralbound (ISBN 9781433832734) and ebook (ISBN 9781433832765) formats. Smaller in size and page count and targeted to undergraduate students, novice writers, or those new to APA Style, the Concise Guide distills the key concepts of APA Style. 

“It [the Concise Guide] covers foundational principles of APA Style, such as ensuring bias-free and inclusive language, avoiding plagiarism and self-plagiarism, and citing reliable sources,” says Ayubi. Speaking of “reliable sources,” the APA has discovered counterfeit copies of both titles turning up in various book marketplaces. Typically, low-quality knockoffs originating overseas—primarily from India—it’s estimated there are about 40,000 counterfeit editions circulating.  

The issue goes beyond loss of revenue: counterfeits often contain errors that can harm scholarship. “If somebody is using a counterfeit Publication Manual and it doesn’t adhere to our guidelines, they’re not accurately learning the guidelines,” says Ayubi. This can result in professors docking points from student papers, professional journals rejecting otherwise valid papers, and reputational damage for all parties concerned.

The APA is working with brand protection experts BC Guardian to monitor online offers for its core titles. “Leveraging data, we’re able to obtain the evidence that we need to verify that a listing or offer is counterfeit,” says Michael Candore, managing director. BC Guardian maintains relationships with marketplaces, U.S. Customs, and distributors to train staff on identifying counterfeits. 

Authentic editions feature unique SecureTag QR codes applied to the back cover. Scanning the code sends users to the official APA Style site. QR codes can be faked, but there are other telltale signs relating to print quality, detailed in the APA’s Counterfeit Identification Guide. And there are some physical “tells” that can help librarians spot fakes immediately. Shoddy binding, missing or incorrect headbands, or incorrectly drilled holes in spiral bound editions are telltale signs of fakes.

More information about how to identify counterfeit style guides can be found at https://apastyle.apa.org/counterfeit-identification-guide

Interlink Publishing 

Established in 1987 and based in Northampton, MA, family-owned Interlink Publishing provides books that specialize in bringing foreign cultures and understanding to American readers. “Our mission is to make the world a little bit smaller,” says Harrison Williams, managing director of Interlink. “We believe that books are a gateway to the soul of a culture.” 

The company publishes 50 to 80 titles a year in the areas of literature, history, contemporary politics, art, cultural guides, international cuisine, and illustrated children’s books from around the globe. “We put a lot of extra work into production and add high value to our books,” says Williams. 

Leadership coach Ginger Chih spent several years with the Dalai Lama. In The Dalai Lama: Leadership and the Power of Compassion, November 2022, ISBN 9781623718145, she explores how leadership can be compassionate and empathetic. While Western thought and leadership focus on the preoccupation with the self, the Dalai Lama emphasizes community and interconnectedness. During the COVID pandemic, people needed a strong, effective, compassionate leader, and Chih’s book, illustrated with her own evocative photography, shows how the Dalai Lama was that selfless role model. 

Raja Khouri is Palestinian; Jeffrey Wilkinson is Israeli. Despite their cultural differences, they have forged a close friendship based on being able to have difficult conversations around the issues that keep a “wall” between Palestinians and Israelis. In The Wall Between: What Jews and Palestinians Don’t Want to Know about Each Other, October 2023, ISBN 9781623717193, the authors offer new ways of speaking—and listening—to each other to find peaceful resolutions to the conflicts that have beset both sides, by humanizing “the other” often seen as the aggressor.  

The Oud: An Illustrated History by Rachel Beckles Willson, November 2023, ISBN 9781623717520, is a history of one of the most iconic musical instruments in Middle Eastern and North African cultures. First made 5,000 years ago, the oud was the predecessor of the lute and, in turn, the guitar. Not just an instrument, it’s an important cultural symbol throughout the Middle East, and the book documents how it often appears in poetry, songs, and movies—not just historically, but in contemporary culture as well.

When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, citizens took to the streets to create striking antiwar imagery. Daoud Sarhandi-Williams, author of Bosnian War Posters, traveled to Ukraine in summer 2022 to photograph that street art, and he shares the images he gathered in Ukraine at War: Street Art, Posters, and Poetry, December 2023, ISBN 9781623717261. “It’s what everyday people were doing—on their garages, to their cars, how they were reusing the detritus of war,” says Sarhandi-Williams. Over time, the imagery became more sophisticated; even Banksy made an appearance, converting an old hotel into a piece of art. The book also features Ukrainian antiwar poetry and a foreword by award-winning Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov. 

Buddhism: A Journey Through Art by Rose M. Woodward, December 2023, ISBN 9781623717162, chronicles Buddhism from its emergence in Tibet to the modern day, showing its spread across the world and how it has influenced our visual identities. Lushly illustrated, it explores Buddhism not necessarily as a religion, but rather as an influence on architecture, fashion, decor, and even our everyday activities. “The purpose is to show how subtle these influences are and how profound they can be on our day-to-day viewing of the world,” says Williams. 

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