Rath, T. (2007), StrengthsFinder 2.0, New York, NY: Gallup Press

The citation, three ways, ready to paste:

APA (7th edition): Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press.MLA (9th edition): Rath, Tom. StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press, 2007.Chicago: Rath, Tom. StrengthsFinder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press, 2007.

A bookseller listing proves the 2007 edition exists, and a citation generator will format the reference for you. Neither explains what StrengthsFinder 2.0 measures, which is usually the question underneath the search. StrengthsFinder 2.0 is a strengths-based development tool. You take a short online test, and it returns your top five of 34 talent themes, the recurring patterns in how you naturally think, feel, and act. The 2007 book is the wrapper: a brief read, plus a code in the back that opens your results.

Who wrote StrengthsFinder 2.0?

Tom Rath wrote it. Rath spent years as a researcher at Gallup, and he built the book on the work of Donald Clifton, the psychologist Gallup calls the father of strengths-based study. Rath's contribution was to make Clifton's idea easy to use: read a chapter, take the test, and get a plain readout of where your talent already concentrates. The book found a wide readership: it reached No. 1 on the Wall Street Journal bestseller list and, in 2011, ranked among the best-selling business books in the world by The Economist's count, which is part of why it still turns up in reading lists and reference sections today. If you want a closer look at the book's contents, we cover what a StrengthsFinder 2.0 PDF gives you and what it holds back in detail.

What is StrengthsFinder 2.0 about?

One idea runs through the whole book: you get further by building on what you are naturally good at than by grinding away at what you are not. Most people can list their weaknesses in seconds and go quiet when asked for their strengths, and the test exists to close that gap. It sorts talent into 34 named themes, from Achiever and Learner to Strategic and Relator, and hands you the five that show up strongest. What you walk away with is a shared vocabulary for something you could feel but struggled to put into words. That vocabulary is the book's main gift, and also the edge of what it can do: it names talent, and stops short of telling you which kind of work will hold you.

The test itself is a timed sort. You read 177 pairs of statements, and for each pair you pick the one that describes you better, with about twenty seconds on the clock per pair. The timer is deliberate: it pushes you toward an instinctive answer before you can manage the impression you give. Your picks are scored into 34 themes, grouped under four domains, Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking, and the book reports the five themes that rank highest for you.

The four domains are a rough map of how talent shows up: getting things done, moving other people, building relationships, and thinking ahead. Most people lean hard into one or two of them and lightly into the rest, which is part of why a top five feels recognizable the moment you read it.

How many themes are in StrengthsFinder 2.0?

Thirty-four. Every taker is measured against all 34, but the book shows only your top five, the ones where your instincts clustered most strongly. The other twenty-nine are ranked behind them and stay out of view unless you pay to see the full list. Five is enough to open a conversation about your talent; it is a headline, not the whole report.

What are the most common CliftonStrengths themes?

Gallup's own frequency data tends to put themes like Achiever, Responsibility, Learner, and Relator near the top of the population, while themes such as Command, Significance, and Self-Assurance turn up far less often. That spread is worth keeping in mind when you read your five: a common theme is not a weaker one, it simply shows up in more people. What matters is the particular set you carry, and how those themes combine into something that is yours.

There is an honest limit built into the method. A timed self-report captures how you see yourself on the day you take it, which is worth knowing and also the ceiling of the approach. The paired-choice format sharpens the read, since choosing between two statements resists the yes-to-everything drift of a rating scale, but it still records your self-image rather than your track record. What a rating-style test can claim, and what needs a reliability check behind it, is set out plainly by the American Psychological Association. StrengthsFinder was built as a development tool, not a hiring filter or a diagnosis, and it reads best when you treat the result as a mirror rather than a verdict.

Finish the test and you get a readout built around your top five. For each theme you see a shared description of what it means, a set of personalized lines about how that theme tends to play out for you, and a short list of ideas for action, concrete ways to put the theme to work. It reads quickly and it lands well, because most people recognize themselves in it at once. Set your expectations in the right place, though: the book opens your top five, and the remaining twenty-nine themes stay behind a separate purchase.

What the readout is best at is language and self-recognition. It gives you and the people you work with a common way to talk about talent, which smooths a lot of friction. What it does not do is tell you which role or environment to choose, and Gallup is upfront that the tool was built for development rather than career direction. That is the seam a strengths result leaves open, and where a fit-focused read picks up.

Can your CliftonStrengths results change?

They can move at the edges. Gallup treats the 34 themes as enduring talents, so your strongest few tend to stay recognizable over years rather than flipping around. The exact order can shift a little between retakes, especially themes that ranked close together, because the test is a self-report and your answers reflect how you read yourself that day. If you took it in 2007 and again now, expect the broad shape to hold and a few positions to trade places. For turning any of those themes into an actual next step, our guide on reading CliftonStrengths results into concrete decisions is a useful companion.

The name on the box changed, but the box did not. In 2018 Gallup rebranded StrengthsFinder as CliftonStrengths, naming it after Donald Clifton rather than the finder-of-strengths idea. The 34 themes, the paired-statement test, and the top-five report all carried straight across. So the 2007 Gallup Press book you are citing is the origin of the assessment people take today under a different name, and a 2007 reference and a current CliftonStrengths result belong to one unbroken line.

The rename does raise a small citation question: should you write StrengthsFinder 2.0 or CliftonStrengths? For the 2007 book, keep the name on the cover, since a reference should name the edition you used. If you took the test recently through Gallup, call it CliftonStrengths, the current product name. Both point back to the same instrument the book introduced.

Can you still take the StrengthsFinder 2.0 test from a 2007 book?

For citing, yes. The book is a fixed historical object: same author, same year, same publisher, and it remains the correct source for the ideas it introduced. For taking the test, the honest answer is that the live version has moved to a newer online experience, so if you want to sit the assessment you would use the current CliftonStrengths platform rather than a decade-old code. Either way, you are dealing with the same instrument under two names.

Two kinds of reader land on this citation. One is a student or writer who needs the reference to hold up in a paper, where getting the year and publisher exactly right is the whole job. The other is a working professional deciding whether a strengths result is worth the afternoon. For the second reader, a top five is a useful start that still leaves the harder question open: which roles and settings will hold your attention once the novelty wears off. It helps to line a theme up against real occupations, and you can do that with O*NET, the public jobs database run by the U.S. Labor Department, which maps skills and interests to hundreds of roles.

Here are the facts a citation needs, in one place. The author is Tom Rath. The year is 2007. The publisher is Gallup Press, tied to Gallup's offices in New York and Omaha. The hardcover carries ISBN 9781595620156. And unlike most business books, the object you are citing came with a working part: a single-use access code printed inside the cover that opened the online test.

How do you cite StrengthsFinder 2.0 in APA?

In APA 7th edition, the current style, cite it as: Rath, T. (2007). StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press. APA 7 drops the publisher city, so the New York, NY location you may have copied from an older source is no longer required. For MLA, use: Rath, Tom. StrengthsFinder 2.0. Gallup Press, 2007. For Chicago, use: Rath, Tom. StrengthsFinder 2.0. New York: Gallup Press, 2007. For an in-text citation, APA uses (Rath, 2007), MLA uses (Rath) or (Rath 12) with a page number, and Chicago's author-date style uses (Rath 2007) while its notes style uses a numbered footnote. If you want to check the template against the source, Purdue's writing lab shows how to format a book reference, and the style's own site lists worked book-citation examples.

One catch the citation never shows: that access code works once, and only once, and it is tied to the printing rather than to you, so it cannot be reset, shared, or resold after it is redeemed. Buy a used copy and the code is usually spent, which is why a cheap secondhand book can leave you unable to take the test at all. The book unlocks your top five; buying access directly from Gallup runs $59.99 for the top five and $99.99 for the full ranking of all 34 themes, so seeing the whole set is always a separate purchase on top.

If you are citing the book for a paper, you now have what you need. If you are weighing a real career move, a top-five snapshot of your talent is a fair start and not a decision. Pigment takes a different measure: it looks at what holds you in a kind of work over months, not only the talents you gravitate toward, using about 120 forced-choice questions and returning named roles with the reason each one suits you. You can see the Pigment career test if that is the question in front of you.