Investigation of Goodreads’ reviews: Kakutanied, deceived or simply honest?
| Pages | 612-626 |
| Date | 13 May 2019 |
| Published date | 13 May 2019 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-07-2018-0104 |
| Author | Lala Hajibayova |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
Investigation of Goodreads’
reviews: Kakutanied, deceived
or simply honest?
Lala Hajibayova
Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of Goodreads’user-generated book reviews
from a linguistic perspective for insights into the psychological aspects of reviewers’perceptions and
behaviors. This examination of users’language and perspectives may shed light on the role and value of
user-generated reviews in complementing the traditional representation of resources and facilitating the
discoverability of cultural objects.
Design/methodology/approach –This study involved a textual analysis of 474,803 unique reviews of
Goodreads’2015 top-rated books generated by 9,335 Goodreads’reviewers. In order to better understand the
nuances of user-generated reviews, a content analysis was applied to 2,500 reviews of each of the five
top-ranked titles in Goodreads’Fiction Literature genre category.
Findings –The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite stable and reliable
dimension across Goodreads’users. The high rate of function words utilized, in particular I-words, coupled
with positive emotion words, suggests that reviewers tended to convey their opinions in order to influence
other individuals’reading choices, or in Bourdieu’s (1985) terms, influence cultural production. In line with
previous studies of user-generated reviews, the prevalence of positive reviews may also imply their unreliable
nature. This study supports the importance of transparency regarding inclusion of user-generated reviews in
traditional systems of knowledge representation, organization and discovery, such as WorldCat.
Originality/value –This study contributes to better understanding of linguistic characteristics of
Goodreads’reviews, including the role and value of user-generated reviews in complementing traditional
representation of resources and facilitating discoverability of cultural objects.
Keywords Goodreads, Goodreads’book reviews, Linguistic analysis of user-generated reviews,
Linguistic characteristics of Goodreads’reviews, Theory of culturalproduction, User-generated book reviews
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
In her tribute to the New York Times’chief daily book Critic, whose name had long ago
entered the lexicon as a transitive verb, Schwartz (2017) writes that Michiko Kakutani’s
critical assessments of literary works have notonly guided generations of readers, but “been
the hope and fear of more writers than could possibly be counted –a seriously big deal, or
ordeal, as the case might be”(para. 1), though to be Kakutanied always bestowed cultural
prestige. However, with the development of a networked information society, the reign of a
few powerfulvoices has given way to participatory cultures thatset relatively low barriersfor
expressionand engagement and empowered ordinary users to connectwith other members of
their networked community and create and share their own critical contents ( Jenkins et al.,
2009). In particular, the user-generated reviews, as “words of mouth,”presumably affect the
purchasing behavior of millions of consumers (Chevalier and Mayzlin, 2006), whereas
businesses believe that a corporate website must provide community content to maintain
customer loyalty in a competitive environment (McWilliam, 2000; Wu et al., 2015).
Studies of user-generated reviews have considered a range of analyses of what makes a
review helpful (e.g. Otterbacher, 2011; Quaschning et al., 2015; Suleman and Vechtomova,
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 75 No. 3, 2019
pp. 612-626
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-07-2018-0104
Received 3 July 2018
Revised 11 December 2018
Accepted 27 December 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
The author would like to thank Dr Timothy Bowman for valuable assistance with data scraping,
Dr Yin Zhang for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper, Dr Sharon Pugh
for editing the multiple iterations of this work and Naydeen Buente for inspirations.
612
JD
75,3
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