Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly research.
Attracted by the promise of a broader and more egalitarian sample of readers than published book reviews provide, researchers are increasingly scraping social reviewing platforms like Goodreads for data about readers' behavior. Yet, treating online book reviews as direct proxies for readers and book...
| Publicado en: | Big Data & Society Vol. 12; no. 3; pp. 1 - 18 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Sage Publications Inc.
Jul-Sep2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=188645832&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 188645832 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 20539517 KG5N jtl: Big Data & Society issn: 20539517 maglogo: Y pubinfo: dt: Jul-Sep2025 vid: 12 iid: 3 pid: 344 pub: Sage Publications Inc. artinfo: ui: 188645832 10.1177/20539517251359229 ppf: 1 ppct: 17 formats: tig: atl: Who decides what is read on Goodreads? Uncovering sponsorship and its implications for scholarly research. aug: au: Hu, Yuerong Diesner, Jana Underwood, Ted LeBlanc, Zoe Layne-Worthey, Glen Downie, John Stephen affil: Department for Information and Library Science, Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington, Bloomington, IN, USA School of Social Sciences and Technology, Technical University Munich, Munich, Germany School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA Department of English, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, Champaign, IL, USA su: Social media Scholarly method Digital technology Patronage Internet publishing Data analysis sug: subj: Social media Scholarly method Digital technology Patronage Internet publishing Data analysis keyword: Critical data studies digital humanities incentivized reviews online book reviews platform capitalism sociotechnical data practices ab: Attracted by the promise of a broader and more egalitarian sample of readers than published book reviews provide, researchers are increasingly scraping social reviewing platforms like Goodreads for data about readers' behavior. Yet, treating online book reviews as direct proxies for readers and books can be problematic, as they are socially and technically constructed artifacts shaped by platform dynamics, whether between developers and users, or book industry stakeholders and reviewers. To uncover these complexities, we computationally curated 331,211 self-identified incentivized book reviews to understand the growth of incentivized content, and how these purportedly equal-access social reviewing spaces are re-inscribing the inequalities of traditional book reviewing and publishing. Our findings underscore the necessity of critical examination of both online book reviewing and cultural datasets derived from social media platforms. With the growing restrictions on access to platform data for research, this study also demonstrates the potential for a mixed-method analysis of historical scraped datasets; an approach that will likely be of interest to many researchers working with cultural data moderated by black-box algorithms. With this method, our research reveals for the first time the scale of the phenomena of incentivized book reviews that is well known to users of Goodreads but remains largely anecdotal. Additionally, it illuminates the rise of sponsored content while contributing to broader discussions on computational approaches to digital economies of prestige and the responsible use of platform-mediated cultural datasets across disciplines. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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