Goodreads reviews to assess the wider impacts of books

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.

Filling the citation gap: measuring the multidimensional impact of the academic book at institutional level with PlumX

“…These are indicators usually related with readership metrics (Haustein, 2014). In the case of Goodreads, this data source has also been explored as to regard to its potential to assess the impact of books (Kousha, Thelwall & Abdoli, 2016;Zuccala et al, 2015). This categorization may be subject of criticism, but one its advantages is that the results are differentiated according to the indicator and their origin and can be aggregated according to the user's criteria.…”

Language, Culture and Traversing the Scholarly Evaluation Landscape

“…To date, a handful of studies have grown from these two contributions, and for researchers with a growing interest in library holding counts, the OCLC-WorldCat seems to be the international catalog of choice (Linmans 2010;Kousha et al 2017;Zuccala and White 2015). OCLC-WorldCat is a union catalog, and because it currently covers libraries worldwide -i.e., academic libraries, national libraries and public libraries -much can be said about a book's perceived cultural visibility and utility.…”

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

“…History and literature seem to be the humanities fields that publish the most book reviews (Gorraiz et al, 2014;Sorli Rojo et al, 2011;Zuccala and van Leeuwen, 2011). Besides book reviews written by scholars, sources that include book reviews from any readers, not necessarily scholars, include Goodreads (Kousha et al, 2017;Zuccala et al, 2015b) and Amazon (Dimitrov et al, 2015;Kousha and Thelwall, 2016b).…”