TY  - JOUR
AB  - 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.
VL  - 67
IS  - 3
SN  - 2050-3806
DO  - 10.1108/AJIM-11-2014-0152
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-11-2014-0152
AU  - Zuccala Alesia A
AU  - Verleysen Frederik T.
AU  - Cornacchia Roberto
AU  - Engels Tim C.E.
ED  - Dr Stefanie Haustein, Dr Cassidy R. Sugimoto and Dr Vincent Larivière
PY  - 2015
Y1  - 2015/01/01
TI  - Altmetrics for the humanities: Comparing Goodreads reader ratings with citations to history books
T2  - Aslib Journal of Information Management
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 320
EP  - 336
Y2  - 2024/04/25
ER  -