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Goodreads: A social network site for book readers
Thelwall, Mike Kousha, Kayvan
Thelwall, Mike
Kousha, Kayvan
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2016-12-21
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Abstract
Goodreads is an Amazon‐owned book‐based social web site for members to share books, read, review books, rate books, and connect with other readers. Goodreads has tens of millions of book reviews, recommendations, and ratings that may help librarians and readers to select relevant books. This article describes a first investigation of the properties of Goodreads users, using a random sample of 50,000 members. The results suggest that about three quarters of members with a public profile are female, and that there is little difference between male and female users in patterns of behavior, except for females registering more books and rating them less positively. Goodreads librarians and super‐users engage extensively with most features of the site. The absence of strong correlations between book‐based and social usage statistics (e.g., numbers of friends, followers, books, reviews, and ratings) suggests that members choose their own individual balance of social and book activities and rarely ignore one at the expense of the other. Goodreads is therefore neither primarily a book‐based website nor primarily a social network site but is a genuine hybrid, social navigation site.
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Thelwall, M. and Kousha, K. (2017), Goodreads: A social network site for book readers. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68(4), pp 972-983. doi:10.1002/asi.23733
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Journal article
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en
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This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 21/12/2016, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23733
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
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2330-1643
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University of Wolverhampton