Tim Spalding at LibraryThing has done some research including a complete data dump of Wikipedia) to find the most cited books in the English language version of the online encyclopedia. Spalding parsed the database looking for citations and other mentions of books.

All told, the data covers 251,911 pages and includes 540,000 citations. They cover some 227,852 works. This is a marked improvement over 2007, when a similar effort found citations to LibraryThing works on only 90,136 pages. It’s not perfect. I don’t try to capture non-ISBN references in running text.* But it’s interesting.**

The complete list contains 100 titles and includes links to each books page in the LibraryThing database

Here are the Top Five

1) Guinness World Records: British Hit Singles and Albums, 2,122 citations

2) Andrews’ Diseases of the Skin: Clinical Dermatology (James, Andrew’s Disease of the Skin), 1,313 citations

3) Air Force Combat Units of World War II, 1,231 citations

4) Jane’s encyclopedia of aviation, 1,184, citations

5) British parliamentary election results, 1918-1949, 839 citations

Source: LibraryThing Blog

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