Top Academic Titles of 2020

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!

1. 1. Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association
   2. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition: DSM-5
   3. Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler
   4. Research Methods for Business Students by Mark N.K. Saunders
   5. Social Research Methods by Alan Bryman
   6. The Chicago Manual of Style by University of Chicago Press Staff
   7. A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge by Project Management Institute
   8. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches by John W. Cresswell
   9. Pharmacology by H. P. Rang
   10. The Study Skills Handbook by Stella Cottrell
   11. Case Study Research: Design and Methods by Robert K. Yin
   12. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity by Judith Butler
   13. Marketing Management by Philip Kotler
   14. International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences by James D. Wright
   15. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
   16. Leadership: Theory and Practice by Peter G. Northouse
   17. Research Methods in Education by Louis Cohen
   18. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo
   19. Doing Your Research Project by Judith Bell
   20. Business Research Methods by Alan Bryman
   21. Molecular Biology of the Cell by Bruce Alberts
   22. The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research by Norman K. Denzin
   23. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Stuart J. Russell
   24. Macroeconomics by Olivier Blanchard
   25. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
   26. Operations Management by Nigel Slack
   27. Orientalism by Edward W. Said
   28. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers by Alexander Osterwalder
   29. Exploring Strategy by Gerry Johnson
   30. 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.

For more information about Syndetics Unbound, please visit Syndetics.com.