Where Do the Bible and the Book of Mormon Fall on This Viral Facebook List of Most Influential Books?

Data scientists at Facebook took advantage of a recent viral challenge in which social media users were asked to share the 10 books that have most profoundly influenced them, with the researchers subsequently compiling a list of the 100 most frequently mentioned texts.

LadaAdamic and Pinkesh Patel, who said they analyzed over 130,000 Facebook status updates from the last two weeks of August, published the rankings along with an explanation on Facebook.

Coming in at number one was the "Harry Potter" book series, with "To Kill a Mockingbird" coming in at number two and "The Lord of the Rings" at number three. As for popular religious texts, the Bible took the sixth spot, with the Book of Mormon coming in at 35.

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The "Harry Potter" series enjoyed somewhat of an unfair advantage in the analysis, as all of the books in the series were clumped into one entry, the researchers noted.

"While there are many great 'serious' books on the list, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy makes an appearance at #7, and Harry Potter reigns supreme (although enjoying the advantage that it was most often referred to as a series and our clustering algorithm lumped all Harry Potter books into the same cluster)," Adamic and Patel explained.

See the top 20 books below:

A screen shot from Facebook's analysis of the most mentioned books

Adamic and Patel explained that the demographics of participating Facebook users likely played a role in which books were selected. While 63.7 percent of those posting the list were in the United States, 9.3 percent came from India and 6.3 percent were in the United Kingdom.

There were more women than men who responded and the average age was 37. The researchers posited that the books chosen would likely reflect these sentiments.

See the complete literary list here.

(H/T: Deseret News)

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