A machine-learning approach to coding book reviews as quality indicators: Toward a theory of megacitation

What books will be your bestseller? A machine learning approach with Amazon Kindle

Purpose

With the rapid increase in internet use, most people tend to purchase books through online stores. Several such stores also provide book recommendations for buyer convenience, and both collaborative and content-based filtering approaches have been widely used for building these recommendation systems. However, both approaches have significant limitations, including cold start and data sparsity. To overcome these limitations, this study aims to investigate whether user satisfaction can be predicted based on easily accessible book descriptions.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors collected a large-scale Kindle Books data set containing book descriptions and ratings, and calculated whether a specific book will receive a high rating. For this purpose, several feature representation methods (bag-of-words, term frequency–inverse document frequency [TF-IDF] and Word2vec) and machine learning classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, naive Bayes and support vector machine) were used.

Findings

The used classifiers show substantial accuracy in predicting reader satisfaction. Among them, the random forest classifier combined with the TF-IDF feature representation method exhibited the highest accuracy at 96.09%.

Originality/value

This study revealed that user satisfaction can be predicted based on book descriptions and shed light on the limitations of existing recommendation systems. Further, both practical and theoretical implications have been discussed.

Measuring book impact via content-level academic review mining

Purpose

As for academic papers, the customary methods for assessing the impact of books are based on citations, which is straightforward but limited to the coverage of databases. Alternative metrics can be used to avoid such limitations, such as blog citations and library holdings. However, content-level information is generally ignored, thus overlooking users’ intentions. Meanwhile, abundant academic reviews express scholars’ opinions on books, which can be used to assess books’ impact via fine-grained review mining. Hence, this study aims to assess books’ use impacts by conducting content mining of academic reviews automatically and thereby confirmed the usefulness of academic reviews to libraries and readers.

Design/methodology/approach

Firstly, 61,933 academic reviews in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries were collected with three metadata metrics. Then, review contents were mined to obtain content metrics. Finally, to identify the reliability of academic reviews, Choice review metrics and other assessment metrics for use impact were compared and analysed.

Findings

The analysis results reveal that fine-grained mining of academic reviews can help users quickly understand multi-dimensional features of books, judge or predict the impacts of mass books, so as to provide references for different types of users (e.g. libraries and public readers) in book selection.

Originality/value

Book impact assessment via content mining can provide more detail information for massive users and cover shortcomings of traditional methods. It provides a new perspective and method for researches on use impact assessment. Moreover, this study’s proposed method might also be a means by which to measure other publications besides books.

Revisiting an open access monograph experiment: measuring citations and tweets 5 years later

An experiment run in 2009 could not assess whether making monographs available in open access enhanced scholarly impact. This paper revisits the experiment, drawing on additional citation data and tweets. It attempts to answer the following research question: does open access have a positive influence on the number of citations and tweets a monograph receives, taking into account the influence of scholarly field and language? The correlation between monograph citations and tweets is also investigated. The number of citations and tweets measured in 2014 reveal a slight open access advantage, but the influence of language or subject should also be taken into account. However, Twitter usage and citation behaviour hardly overlap.