You can filter the list by different fields. When the "Chemistry" filter is applied, the #1 text is "Chemistry: The Central Science" by Brown, et al. No surprise there - it's the text I use and I've always heard that it is extremely popular. There are 3 other General Chemistry texts in the top 10, as well as 4 Organic texts, 1 P-Chem text and 1 Analytical text, which is also not too far from what I would expect. Enrollment in upper level chemistry classes is always much smaller since all the premeds and other nonmajors have left, so P-Chem, Analytical and Inorganic would be expected to be lower.
Being a polymer chemist, I'm curious where the first polymer chemistry text is on the list. It's a disappointing #122 - Polymers: Chemistry and Physics of Modern Materials by J. M. G. Cowie. In fact, there are 9 biochem texts higher on the list than this. 9! Apparently polymer chemistry classes are quite rare, about as rare as the polymerization of a non-terminal olefin. Augsburg College, where I teach, doesn't have a polymer chemistry class (despite my efforts to create and teach one), and I suspect that that is true elsewhere given the data above.
This is all just another example of how lonely it is to be a polymer chemist. If you want to be rich and/or famous for writing a chemistry textbook, write one for General, Organic, Physical, Inorganic or Bio-chemistry. ANYTHING but polymer chemistry.
[*] Of that I'm sure. The syllabus for the class I teach is only available on the college's internal website - no webcrawlers allowed.
2 comments:
In filtering for chemistry texts as you mention, I noticed the list is associated with some quite old dates. I believe those are certain author's birth dates, which seemed to be commonly recorded in the frontispiece (?) in books published before that practice was discontinued. Anyway, I hope author birthdates no longer being reported at some point account for most on the list predating even the baby boom generation versus some other explanation for their skewing old.
@Anonymous,
Yes, I noticed the dates, and agree that it is the authors' birth dates (although some of the death dates are provided too). I don't believe that that statistic is used in the ranking (I could be wrong), but I can't see that that would skew the results against polymer chemists - or are polymer chemists just a bunch of old guys that died off years ago? (Well, at least my life insurance is paid off for this month, so my wife has that going for her.)
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