Loading...
Goodreads Reviews to Assess the Wider Impacts of Books
Kousha, Kayvan Thelwall, Mike Abdoli, Mahshid
Kousha, Kayvan
Thelwall, Mike
Abdoli, Mahshid
Editors
Other contributors
Affiliation
Epub Date
Issue Date
2017-06-01
Submitted date
Alternative
Abstract
Although peer-review and citation counts are commonly used to help assess the scholarly impact of published research, informal reader feedback might also be exploited to help assess the wider impacts of books, such as their educational or cultural value. The social website Goodreads seems to be a reasonable source for this purpose because it includes a large number of book reviews and ratings by many users inside and outside of academia. To check this, Goodreads book metrics were compared with different book-based impact indicators for 15,928 academic books across broad fields. Goodreads engagements were numerous enough in the Arts (85% of books had at least one), Humanities (80%) and Social Sciences (67%) for use as a source of impact evidence. Low and moderate correlations between Goodreads book metrics and scholarly or non-scholarly indicators suggest that reader feedback in Goodreads reflects the many purposes of books rather than a single type of impact. Although Goodreads book metrics can be manipulated they could be used guardedly by academics, authors, and publishers in evaluations.
Citation
Kousha, K., Thelwall, M., & Abdoli, M. (2017). Goodreads reviews to assess the wider impacts of books. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 68 (8), pp 2004-2016.
Publisher
Research Unit
PubMed ID
PubMed Central ID
Embedded videos
Additional Links
Type
Journal article
Language
en
Description
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by John Wiley & Sons in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology on 17/07/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23805
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
Series/Report no.
ISSN
2330-1635