Evaluating the Humanities.

This project contributes to measuring the impact academic monographs from the field of History have on wider society outside of academia. It stems from the notion that the publication output from the Social Sciences and Humanities can have an 'enlightenment' role for a broad, not strictly academic readership. We analyse this using a novel, 'altmetric' data source from the internet, namely ratings (a numerical score) and reviews (written text) from Goodreads.com, a non-academic and non-commercial social platform specifically devoted to the posting of reader's evaluations of books from all genres and disciplines, thus including History. This data is enriched by bibliographic descriptions from OCLC Worldcat, and combined with citation data from academic journals indexed in Scopus. The methodology consists of calculating correlations: 1° between academic (citation) impact and a societal impact (ratings and reviews), and 2° between high societal impact and various book characteristics such as publisher, year and country of publication, author profile and subject matter. In addition, we perform a qualitative analysis of written reader reviews.

Keywords:HUMANITIES, PUBLICATION, BIBLIOGRAPHY

Disciplines:Information sciences, Other information and computing sciences, Library sciences