AcademicInfluence.com's Inflection Reveals Today's Most Influential Books in Law, Economics, Mathematics, Biology, and Criminal Justice

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Feb 11, 2021, 08:37 ET

FORT WORTH, Texas, Feb. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Truly revolutionary ideas can alter the course of thinking for an entire generation of artists, scientists, or academics. And often, those ideas see their first public exposure in a book.

Inflection, the opinion, editorial, and news analysis journal of AcademicInfluence.com, selects the law, economics, mathematics, biology, and criminal justice books that matter most. Whether released 300 years ago or in just the last decade, these books continue to have a profound impact on their respective fields of study, even today:

Whether new or old, these are the law, economics, mathematics, biology, and criminal justice books that are influencing their fields of study today

We measured the influence of these books using ranking analysis powered by machine learning and collected from a comprehensive online data repository. Each book was assigned an objective measure of influence within its subfield based on the number of references it has received in both the academic literature and the popular media. The result is a more unbiased, manipulation-resistant, and usable ranking.

"We've moved beyond impact conjecture to a more objective, data-driven view of books that are changing the world," says Dr. Jed Macosko, academic director of AcademicInfluence.com and professor of physics at Wake Forest University.

A sampling of top titles selected:

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander, 2010
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, Radley Balko, 2013
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference, Cordelia Fine, 2010
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Charles Darwin, 1859
Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone, 1765–1770
Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings, Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, 2010
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, 2011
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, 2014
Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, Max Tegmark, 2014
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't, Nate Silver, 2012

Visit the links above to view the final ranking order.

"The books that made it into these lists aren't just influential. They are, in many cases, the very fabric of their respective disciplines," says Macosko. "If you were to invest yourself in the 25 books listed for each topic, you'd be on your way to a robust understanding of the field in question."

AcademicInfluence.com is the preeminent technology-driven rankings site dedicated to students, researchers, and inquirers from high school through college and beyond, offering resources that connect learners to leaders. AcademicInfluence.com is a part of the EducationAccess group, a family of sites dedicated to lifelong learning and personal growth, including Influence Networks, InfluencePublishers.com (nonfiction publishing and publishers of Bright Notes), IntelligentEducation.com (instructional video library and easy instructional video creation with 3D elements), AlexandriaLibrary.com (free, online library and reader), and soon, Success Portraits (personalized strengths inventory for college and career).

Contact:
Jed Macosko, Ph.D.
Academic Director
AcademicInfluence.com
[email protected]
(682) 302-4945

SOURCE AcademicInfluence.com