To help you get career advancement in purchasing and procurement, we evaluate top books in this field based on 7 criteria to uncover best purchasing books.

In Search of the Best Purchasing Books

Historically, procurement people are considered a kind of clerical workers who are expected to perform basic tasks such as document issuance and price negotiation. However, modern procurement practice has become a part of the company's success to reduce costs, improve service and create innovative products. And now companies are relying on purchasing performance. Tim Cook who is known to have a procurement background has created the supply chain revolution at Apple Inc using the procurement process and procurement strategy.

In order to establish a good career path in this area, lifelong learning is a key and good books play the important role in your career advancement.

The Ranking of Purchasing Books

To come up with a list of top procurement and purchasing, we collect data as below,

First, we collect the name of the books from Amazon.com.

Then, we remove books dedicated to logistics and supply chain, six sigma, materials management, inventory management, global logistics, fashion buying and risk management from the list (only purchasing, procurement, sourcing and supply management books remain on the list.)

After that, we collect various metrics for the books, namely,

- Citation Counts: a basic bibliometric method showing how many times each book is cited by other publications. Citation counts indicate how well the books performs against its peers.

- Worldcat: a new kind of bibliometric method showing how many copies are stored in various libraries around the world (info can be retrieved from Worldcat.com) Numbers of copies indicate how useful the books are (in the eye of library staffs.)

- Amazon Customer Review: numbers of stars the books get from the reviews available on Amazon.com. We use only positive reviews (3 stars or more) to evaluate a book.

- Sales Rank: this metric illustrates how well each book performs in the eye of the end users. Books that are easy to read tend to perform better (number close to 1 is better.)

- Number of Pages: this metric shows how comprehensive each book is (the more is the better.)

- Number of Editions: how many times each book gets revised during its lifetime. We believe only good books get the revised edition(s.)

- Recency: "time since the last update" indicates how "fresh" each book is. Of course, this metric will not be used in isolation. We will exclude a book from the list if it doesn't have a revised edition at all in the past 5 years (we assume this kind of book is "obsolete".)

Finally, we compare the metrics of each book and select the best books based on overall performance.

In case the author produced more than one books, only the book with the highest overall performance will be included.