Book impact assessment: A quantitative and text-based exploratory analysis

Books are an important source of knowledge to disseminate information. Researchers and academicians write books to propagate their innovative research or teachings amongst academic as well as non-academic audience. The number of books written every year is increasing rapidly. According to International Publisher Association (IPA) annual report 2015-2016, around 150 million different books were published worldwide in 2014-2015. Many e-commerce websites are also involved in selling books. A recent addition to book publishing world is e-books, which have really made it very simple to publish. While, availability of large number of books is good for readers, at the same time it is challenging to find a good book, particularly in scholarly settings. Researchers in the area of Scientometrics have attempted to view assessment of goodness of a scholarly book by measuring citations that a book receive. However, citations alone are not a true measure of a book's impact. Many a times people use the knowledge in a book without actually citing it. Also use of books in classroom settings or for general reading often is not reflected in terms of citations. Therefore, it is important to obtain users's opinion about a book from other forms of data. Fortunately, we have now some data of this sort available in form of reviews, downloads and social media mentions etc. Amazon and Goodreads, both of which provide the readers' views about a book, are two good examples. This paper presents an exploratory research work on using these non-traditional data about books to assess impact of a book. A set of Scopus-indexed computer science books with good citations as well as some other popular books in computer science domain are used for analysis. The reviews of books have been crawled in an automated fashion from Amazon and Goodreads. Thereafter sentiment analysis is carried out the text of reviews. Results of sentiment analysis are compared and correlated with traditional impact assessment metrics. The experimental analysis does not show a coherent relationship between citation and online reviews. Also, majority of the online reviews are found to be positive for large number of books in the dataset. As a related exercise, the Scopus citation data and Google scholar citation data for books are also compared. A high value of correlation is observed in these two. Overall the exploratory analysis provides a useful insight into the problem of book impact assessment.