A.N.N.A.
Anna’s Neat Novel Analysis
My distinctions this trimester was a data analysis project about young adult and adult books. Reading and books are something I love and so I thought why not do an analysis project on them! This project compared data sets including the publication date of a book, the genre, and the average star rating. All of my data comes from the Goodreads site. This project has been through a lot. In the beginning, I was going to compare the number of sales a book got, but that proved too hard to collect data on. Once I dismissed that idea, I went a simpler, but still detailed, route. Take a look here to see my data collection that I put together!
This graph above shows the popularity of each genre by the average star rating. The x-axis is the genre and the y-axis is the average star rating for that genre.
Looking at the data, you can see that both dystopian/sci-fi and fantasy are very close. This is because these two genres are the largest of my data. Contemporary is the highest rated genre but that is because there are less books in that genre overall and those books average are fairly high. The supernatural and mystery/thriller genres have the least amount of books in them. But within their category, the mystery/thriller books are rated pretty high, while the books in the supernatural genre have a lower rating in general.
This graph below represents the publication date in relation to the rating. It visually shows how many years a book has been published affects the average rating. The y-axis is the star rating, and the x-axis is the publication date.
Harry Potter is the earliest published book on this graph, and its star rating is a little below 4.5. But at the right side of the graph there is another book, Chain of Gold, rated the same, but it's been published this year in March. While it seems like Chain of Gold is rated higher than Harry potter, this is not the case.
This is because Harry Potter has over 7 million ratings, and all 7 million of those combined creates the 4.47 rating. Chain of Gold, on the other hand, only has 35,000 ratings. And while most of these ratings are 4 and 5 stars, there are less ratings to create a fair average.
Even though it seems like Chain of Gold is rated higher, once you put in account the number of ratings, Harry Potter is the higher rated book.