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.

Do you need a purchasing book?

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 has become a part of the company's success to reduce costs, improve service and create innovative products.

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

In Search of the Best Purchasing Books

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

First, we collect the names of purchasing and procurement books from Amazon.com.

After that, we collect various metrics for each book, namely,

- Citation Counts: a basic bibliometric method showing how many times each book is cited by other publications. Citation counts indicate how well each book 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 each purchasing and procurement book is (in the eye of library staffs.)

- Amazon Customer Review: numbers of stars each book gets 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 (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 purchasing and procurement 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 purchasing and procurement books based on overall performance.

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