Altmetrics for the humanities

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the value of Goodreads reader ratings for measuring the wider impact of scholarly books published in the field of History. Design/methodology/approach – Book titles were extracted from the reference lists of articles that appeared in 604 history journals indexed in Scopus (2007-2011). The titles were cleaned and matched with WorldCat.org (for publisher information) as well as Goodreads (for reader ratings) using an API. A set of 8,538 books was first filtered based on Dewey Decimal Classification class 900 “History and Geography”, then a subset of 997 books with the highest citations and reader ratings (i.e. top 25 per cent) was analysed separately based on additional characteristics. Findings – A weak correlation (0.212) was found between citation counts and reader rating counts for the full data set (n=8,538). An additional correlation for the subset of 997 books indicated a similar weak correlation (0.190). Further correlations between citations, reader ratings, written reviews, and library holdings indicate that a reader rating on Goodreads was more likely to be given to a book held in an international library, including both public and academic libraries. Originality/value – Research on altmetrics has focused almost exclusively on scientific journal articles appearing on social media services (e.g. Twitter, Facebook). In this paper we show the potential of Goodreads reader ratings to identify the impact of books beyond academia. As a unique altmetric data source, Goodreads can allow scholarly authors from the social sciences and humanities to measure the wider impact of their books.

Goodreads: A social network site for book readers

“…Because the site contains millions of user reviews of books, it may also inform librarians for purchasing strategies and other services (Blackwell & Springer, ; Herther, ; Hooper, ; Jeffries, ; Moyer, ; Naik, ; Stover, ; Tarulli & Caplinger, ; Wyatt, ). Some of the reviews and recommendations are of academic books and so the site may also be useful as a source of evidence about the impact of scholarly books (Zuccala, Verleysen, & Engels, ; Zuccala, Verleysen, Cornacchia, & Engels, ). Nevertheless, the commercial value of the site to publishers and its open nature gives it the potential to be spammed by fake positive reviews, as has been a problem on the http://Amazon.com site (BBC, ).…”

PlumX As a Potential Tool to Assess the Macroscopic Multidimensional Impact of Books

“…Reviews are also one of the most characteristic footprints of a book, and the data originating from tools such as Amazon and Goodreads are certainly of crucial importance as has already been reported in prior studies (Zuccala and Van Leeuwen, 2011;Gorraiz et al, 2014b;Zuccala et al, 2015). More than half of the books were "captured" in Goodreads while only one-fourth in Mendeley.…”

“…• library holdings such as the number of catalog entries per book title in WorldCat ® (Torres-Salinas and Moed, 2009), library bindings (Linmans, 2010), and even introducing an indicator of perceived cultural benefit (White et al, 2009) • document delivery requests (Gorraiz and Schlögl, 2006) • library loans (Cabezas-Clavijo et al, 2013) • publishers' prestige (Torres-Salinas et al, 2012, 2013Giménez-Toledo et al, 2013) • book reviews (Nicolaisen, 2002;Zuccala and Van Leeuwen, 2011;Gorraiz et al, 2014b;Bornmann, 2015;Kousha and Thelwall, 2015a,b;Zuccala et al, 2015;Kousha et al, 2016;Thelwall and Kousha, 2016;Zhou et al, 2016) • altmetrics (Zhou and Zhang, 2013).…”

Evaluating the impact of books in Chinese Studies: A case study of books authored by UCLA scholars

“…It can directly reflect the degree of academic outputs concerned or used. The earliest empirical analysis of book impact using altmetric indicators was by Zuccala et al (2015), who took 8,538 books published in the field of history as their study sample and found a weak correlation between citation counts and Goodreads reader rating counts. Kousha and Thelwall (2016b) found a low-to-moderate correlation between citations and Amazon reviews based on a set of 2,739 academic books and a set of 1,305 bestsellers.…”