Best Practices for Textbook Selection

Purpose of this Guide

Welcome! This guide is dedicated to helping faculty select high-quality resources for inclusion in their courses. The menu at the side will help guide you to resources, criteria, and tools to help you as you look to select materials that will best meet the needs of your course curriculum and the needs of your students.

What is a textbook?

The library utilizes defined criteria for what a textbook is and how it is distinguished from other books and resources. An item that contains many or all of the criteria below would be considered a textbook:

• The book contains tertiary information, reporting from possibly primary and secondary sources in a summary way and at times with little bibliographic citation of specific sources.
• The preface states that it is a textbook for a given topic, with an outline of the content coverage.
• The content is sequential so that you have to know information from earlier sections or chapters to understand the later ones;
• Chapters begin with stated learning objectives;
• Chapters have summaries or reviews at the end; 
• Chapters have problems or discussion questions, frequently at the end;
• Chapters sometimes have inset boxes that explore a concept in an empirical way, translating the theory to practice;
• The book has other indicators like:
  • New Editions are issued very frequently;
  • The Publisher is known for textbook publishing:
    • Cengage/Gale
    • Pearson
    • Macmillan
    • Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
    • Prentice Hall
    • Sometimes Emerald, Routledge, Wiley, or Sage
  • The book has one author or set of authors responsible for the entire work (Not chapters credited to separate individuals)