We recently did a blog post on the Top Syndetics Unbound Titles of 2020, covering what public-library patrons were searching for and finding in 2020. But what about academic libraries? This data was aggregated across libraries using Syndetics Unbound worldwide.
The picture is more complicated in academic libraries than public libraries.
First, academic libraries differ from each other more than public ones do.
Titles that head the list month after month at technical colleges may not even
appear at a law or divinity library. Second, academic library usage is often
spread out across larger collections and is less hit-driven. Although books
like Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, Jeanine Cummins’ _American Dirt,
and _Michelle Obama’s Becoming—top books on the public list—appear on the
academic list too, they do so lower, and far lower as a percentage of all
academic-library searches.
The Ranking
In place of hot fiction titles, core reference and textbooks dominate. Not only
are the Publication Manual of the APA and the DSM-V first and second, but _they
were first and second in every month of 2020! _
Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5
Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler
Research Methods for Business Students by Mark N.K. Saunders
Social Research Methods by Alan Bryman
The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press Staff
A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge by Project Management Institute
Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Cresswell
Pharmacology by H. P. Rang
The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell
Case Study Research: Design and Methods by Robert K. Yin
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
Marketing Management by Philip Kotler
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences by James D. Wright
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Leadership: Theory and Practice by Peter G. Northouse
Research Methods in Education by Louis Cohen
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
Doing Your Research Project by Judith Bell
Business Research Methods by Alan Bryman
Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts
The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research by Norman K. Denzin
Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell
Macroeconomics by Olivier Blanchard
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
Operations Management by Nigel Slack
Orientalism by Edward W. Said
Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder
Exploring Strategy by Gerry Johnson
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault
Two Waves of Anti-Racism Books
As in public libraries, books about race, policing and criminal justice jumped
enormously in searches following the George
Floyd protests, which
began on May 26 in reaction to the homicide of George Floyd at the hands of
police.
Unlike public libraries, however, academic libraries saw a second spike in
searches as the Fall semester began and these books made their way into many
syllabi. This was not just absolute usage numbers, which increase in the Fall.
The chart below shows the percent of searches.
The books referenced are:
The End of Policing by Alex S. Vitale
Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad
White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Caste by Isabel Wilkerson
How Do We Know?
This data was collected by Syndetics Unbound. The search data is fully
anonymized the day it is collected. As the Coronavirus lockdowns caused a
significant drop in catalog searches, and Syndetics Unbound added new libraries
continuously throughout the year, we levelled the playing field by treating all
months as equal in size.
