How is 'score' calculated on lists?

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How is 'score' calculated on lists?

1shemthepenman
feb 1, 2021, 4:28 am

Hello,

I am finally making use of the list function on Librarything and enjoying adding my books to the 'Books Read in 2021' list. I see that, by default, they are arranged by score. This doesn't appear to be the number of people who have added said work to the list, so how is it calculated?

Thanks!

2gilroy
feb 1, 2021, 5:56 am

That depends on how the list is set up.

On Numbered lists, the score is the sum of the ranking of everyone who has the book on "their list" when using yours.
On Unnumbered lists, the score is the count of the number of people who have the book on "their list" when using yours.

3shemthepenman
feb 8, 2021, 1:58 pm

Thank you for this. I seem to no longer be able to rearrange the order of my book on a specific list. Also when I click on the "Your List" or "Your collection" header nothing happened. This only started happening a few days ago, before that I could re-arrange my list, etc.

4gilroy
feb 8, 2021, 3:38 pm

I believe there's a bug report in regarding that:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/329567

5shemthepenman
feb 9, 2021, 3:51 am

Thank you.

6dhm
Bewerkt: dec 29, 2021, 8:01 pm

I've just come from the same list ('Books read in 2021') because I had the same question: I can't make out what the score means. Sadly, I can't interpret the answer given in no. 2 above. The list would appear to be numbered, since sorting it in different ways puts differently numbered entries at the top, but I really can't figure out what the score means. If I sort by author, #4253 appears at the top ('Twixt the Cup and the Lip') and the score is 1.15. What does "...the sum of the ranking of everyone (i.e. one person)" ...when using yours... (i.e. list)" mean?

Alternatively, sorting by score shows the top book scoring 43.87. Again, I can't interpret the "...when using yours..." language. Help, I'd love to understand. Thanks.

7gilroy
dec 30, 2021, 6:06 am

>6 dhm: Okay, let's look at your list in question.
On your list it says 99 people have contributed 5037 books.

If all people did was add to the prime list, there is no interaction to having lists, which is not what Tim wanted.
Note that there is a second column which lists "Add to your list" and then a group of people users beneath it with a number in parenthesis. This is where the score comes in.

When you click on Add to Your List, you now have a sub-list of the full list, which you can organize. Where you place the book in your sub-list creates a number by your name in the parenthesis. Just for the ease of numbers, I'm going to say the list is 20 books and your sub-list has five, with 4 users. The book rated #1 in your sub-list now gets a score of 5, book #2 gets 4, and so on down the list. When you look at the full list, if everyone rated that book #1, your score would be 5. But if two of those people ranked it as #5 instead of #1, now you suddenly have a score of 3.40.

For the sake of the list in question, 15 people have added the book with a score of 43.87 to their sub-list. Because I don't know the length of each of these sub-lists, I can't make a good extrapolation on numbers, but the lowest ranking of the book is 162. So the score is an average of the ranking of how people rated them on their sub-list.

You can access your sub-list at the top of the page, where it says "Your List."

8dhm
jan 3, 2022, 10:55 pm

Ah, this time I get it -- thanks for revisiting!