In repackaging other publications for its readers, the "Analytical Review" participated in the encyclopedic movement of the eighteenth century, a movement largely begun by Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert's "Encyclopédie". Excited and yet overwhelmed by what they viewed as a dramatic increase in human knowledge, encyclopedists of the era aimed to organize and classify all of this new knowledge using a new reference system: the encyclopedia. The "Analytical Review" was part of this project and its editors believed that they were preserving the knowledge of the past and the present for the future. The journal was, according to scholar Nathaniel Teich, "the most important radical review adopting the encyclopedic format for the attempted universal coverage of published works". Yet, the editors also recognized the ultimate futility of such a project.