Goodreads reviews to assess the wider impacts of books

Role of citation and non-citation metrics in predicting the educational impact of textbooks

Purpose

The main objective of the present study is to determine the role of citation-based metrics (PageRank and HITS’ authority and hub scores) and non-citation metrics (Goodreads readers, reviews and ratings, textbook edition counts) in predicting educational ranks of textbooks.

Design/methodology/approach

The rankings of 1869 academic textbooks of various disciplines indexed in Scopus were extracted from the Open Syllabus Project (OSP) and compared with normalized counts of Scopus citations, scores of PageRank, authority and hub (HITS) in Scopus book-to-book citation network, Goodreads ratings and reviews, review sentiment scores and WorldCat book editions.

Findings

Prediction of the educational rank of scholarly syllabus books ranged from 32% in technology to 68% in philosophy, psychology and religion. WorldCat editions in social sciences, medicine and technology, Goodreads ratings in humanities, and book-citation-network authority scores in law and political science accounted for the strongest predictions of the educational score. Thus, each indicator of editions, Goodreads ratings, and book citation authority score alone can be used to show the rank of the academic textbooks, and if used in combination, they will help explain the educational uptake of books even better.

Originality/value

This is the first study examining the role of citation indicators, Goodreads readers, reviews and ratings in predicting the OSP rank of academic books.

¿Qué hace que un tuit sobre un libro sea popular? Análisis de los contenidos más retuiteados creados por editoriales de libros españolas y extranjeras

El objetivo de este artículo es identificar características relacionadas con el contenido de los mensajes más retuiteados creados por editoriales de libros españolas y extranjeras en Twitter. Se ha realizado un análisis de contenido para identificar el tema de los tuits y si incluyen hashtag para el título del libro, imágenes e hipervínculos, y en caso de incluirse, sobre qué son las imágenes y hacia dónde apuntan los enlaces. Como complemento, se ha realizado un análisis de asociación de palabras para identificar qué términos son asociados con cada una de las diferentes editoriales. En general, las editoriales tienden a tuitear sobre ellas mismas y sus libros con fines de marketing. Aproximadamente la mitad de las editoriales tienen cuentas en Twitter. Los tuits más populares de las editoriales españolas suelen contener citas literarias, mientras que los tuits más populares de las editoriales extranjeras tienden más a incluir sorteos. Los editores que buscan comprometerse con lectores potenciales en Twitter podrían considerar las citas y los sorteos para construir su audiencia, además de etiquetar al nombre de usuario del autor (@nombredeusuario) en tuits relacionados con libros para ayudar al autor con su red social.

OCLC library holdings: assessing availability of academic books in libraries in print and electronic compared to citations and altmetrics

Although library holding data is constructed upon work format of books, it is less known how much print and electronic books in libraries contribute to the library holding counts. In response, this research is an attempt to explore the distribution of library holding data across work formats and investigate the availability of library print holdings and library electronic holdings for books as constituents of the library holding metric across fields and over time and compared with other book metrics. ISBNs, titles and author names of 119,794 Scopus-indexed book titles across 26 fields were examined for fourteen variables including OCLC Library Holdings, Scopus Citations, Google Books Citations, Goodreads engagements, and Altmetric indicators. There are three major findings: (a) library holdings are a more comprehensively available metric for books (over 97%) than any other metric and could be useful after short time after first edition publication, followed by Google Books, Goodreads and Scopus, respectively; (b) on average electronic holdings are seven times (median three times) more numerous than print holdings and their ratio is growing considerably for more recent books; (c) there is consistent downward trend in average print book holdings, suggesting that library print holding data are cumulative in nature and statistically comparable to formal citations; however, acquisition of electronic books in libraries is inconsistent in distribution plot as well as over time. In sum, the differences between print and electronic holding data are broad making them distinct metrics, suggesting that further research is needed for understanding their implications for book impact assessment.

Why does library holding format really matter for book impact assessment?: Modelling the relationship between citations and altmetrics with print and electronic holdings

Scholarly books are important outputs in some fields and their many publishing formats seem to introduce opportunities to scrutinize their impact. As there is a growing interest in the publisher-enforced massive collection of ebooks in libraries in the past decade, this study examined how this influences the relationship that library print holdings (LPH), library electronic holdings (LEH) and total library holdings (TLH) have with other metrics. As a follow up study to a previous research on OCLC library holdings, the relationship between library holdings and twelve other metrics including Scopus Citations, Google Books (GB) Citations, Goodreads engagements, and Altmetric indicators were examined for 119,794 Scopus-indexed book titles across 26 fields. Present study confirms the weak correlation levels observed between TLH and other indicators in previous studies and contributes additional evidence that print holdings can moderately reflect research, educational and online impact of books consistently more efficient than eholdings and total holdings across fields and over time, except for Mendeley for which eholdings slightly prevailed. Regression models indicated that along with other dimensions, Google Books Citations frequently best explained LPH (in 14 out of 26 fields), whereas Goodreads User counts were weak, but the best predictor of both LEH and TLH (in 15 fields out of 26), suggesting significant association of eholdings with online uptake of books. Overall, findings suggest that inclusion of eholdings overrides the more impactful counts of print holdings in Total Library Holdings metric and therefore undermines the statistical results, whilst print holdings has both statistically and theoretically promising underlying assumptions for prediction of impact of books and shows greater promise than the general Library Holding metric for book impact assessment. Thus, there is a need for a distinction between print and electronic holding counts to be made, otherwise total library holding data need to be interpreted with caution.

A Global Book Reading Dataset

The choice of what to read is both influenced by and indicative of such factors as a person’s beliefs, culture, gender, and socioeconomic status. However, obtaining data including such personal attributes, as well as detailed reading habits and activities of individuals is difficult and would usually require either (i) data from e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle, or from library checkouts, both of which are hard to obtain, or (ii) distributing questionnaires and conducting interviews, which can be expensive and suffers from recall bias. In this study, we present a dataset of over 40 million reading instances of 1,872,677 unique individuals collected from Goodreads. Goodreads is a book-cataloging social media platform with millions of users, where users share comments on the books they have read, while creating and maintaining social connections. We enrich the dataset with gender and location information. The dataset presented in this study can be used to perform cross-national and cross-gender analyses of reading behavior among book enthusiasts.

Graphic novels through the lens of Goodreads reviews: Artistic, textual, or blend of both?

In this study, a textual analysis of the linguistic characteristics of Goodreads user-generated reviews associated with popular graphic novels revealed reviewers’ rich evaluations of both textual and visual characteristics of the novels as well as the embodied orientation of the reviewers’ narrations, wherein positive emotions associated with the reading experience dominated. Overall, the blend of users’ unique perceptions of textual and visual characteristics of graphic novels contributes to the genre’s vivid representation and discoverability. The machine analysis of user-generated reviews revealed a high rate of function words, pronouns, and auxiliary verbs, which may suggest reviewers’ social orientation. This high rate of function words and the overall positive tone of the reviews may also be interpreted as reviewers’ attempts to promote their reviews and influence others’ reading choices.

Investigation of Goodreads’ reviews: Kakutanied, deceived or simply honest?

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of Goodreads’ user-generated book reviews from a linguistic perspective for insights into the psychological aspects of reviewers’ perceptions and behaviors. This examination of users’ language and perspectives may shed light on the role and value of user-generated reviews in complementing the traditional representation of resources and facilitating the discoverability of cultural objects.

Design/methodology/approach

This study involved a textual analysis of 474,803 unique reviews of Goodreads’ 2015 top-rated books generated by 9,335 Goodreads’ reviewers. In order to better understand the nuances of user-generated reviews, a content analysis was applied to 2,500 reviews of each of the five top-ranked titles in Goodreads’ Fiction Literature genre category.

Findings

The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite stable and reliable dimension across Goodreads’ users. The high rate of function words utilized, in particular I-words, coupled with positive emotion words, suggests that reviewers tended to convey their opinions in order to influence other individuals’ reading choices, or in Bourdieu’s (1985) terms, influence cultural production. In line with previous studies of user-generated reviews, the prevalence of positive reviews may also imply their unreliable nature. This study supports the importance of transparency regarding inclusion of user-generated reviews in traditional systems of knowledge representation, organization and discovery, such as WorldCat.

Originality/value

This study contributes to better understanding of linguistic characteristics of Goodreads’ reviews, including the role and value of user-generated reviews in complementing traditional representation of resources and facilitating discoverability of cultural objects.

Estimación del valor educativo de los libros académicos que no están en inglés: el caso de España

Este estudio examina el valor educativo de 15.117 libros escritos en español y publicados por editoriales españolas en disciplinas de ciencias sociales y humanidades en el período 2002-2011, en base a las menciones que reciben desde guías docentes en línea. Se implementó un método para identificar automáticamente las menciones y filtrar los resultados. El chequeo manual de las 52.716 menciones encontradas estimó una precision del 99,5% para filtrar las menciones falsas y del 74,7% para identificar las menciones correctas. Una quinta parte de los libros (2.849; 19%) se mencionaron al menos una vez en guías académicas en línea, y casi todos ellos (95%) han sido publicados por un tercio de las editoriales incluídas en el estudio. Un análisis detallado de los 23 libros más recomendados en guías docentes mostró que la mayoría son monografías de humanidades con un solo autor, escritos originalmente en español. Las menciones procedieron de 379 dominios web, mayoritariamente de sitios web de universidades españolas. En conclusión, es posible crear indicadores a partir de las menciones en guías docentes para evaluar el valor educativo de los libros en español, aunque se requieren chequeos manuales si los valores se usan para evaluar libros individuales.

Do prestigious Spanish scholarly book publishers have more teaching impact?

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to assess the educational value of prestigious and productive Spanish scholarly publishers based on mentions of their books in online scholarly syllabi.

Design/methodology/approach

Syllabus mentions of 15,117 books from 27 publishers were searched for, manually checked and compared with Microsoft Academic (MA) citations.

Findings

Most books published by Ariel, Síntesis, Tecnos and Cátedra have been mentioned in at least one online syllabus, indicating that their books have consistently high educational value. In contrast, few books published by the most productive publishers were mentioned in online syllabi. Prestigious publishers have both the highest educational impact based on syllabus mentions and the highest research impact based on MA citations.

Research limitations/implications

The results might be different for other publishers. The online syllabus mentions found may be a small fraction of the syllabus mentions of the sampled books.

Practical implications

Authors of Spanish-language social sciences and humanities books should consider general prestige when selecting a publisher if they want educational uptake for their work.

Originality/value

This is the first study assessing book publishers based on syllabus mentions.