Alternative Metrics for Book Impact Assessment: Can Choice Reviews be a Useful Source?

This article assesses whether academic reviews in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries could be systematically used for indicators of scholarly impact, uptake or educational value for scholarly books. Based on 451 Choice book reviews from 2011 across the humanities, social sciences and science, there were significant but low correlations between Choice ratings and citation and non-citation impact metrics. The highest correlations found were with Google Books citations (.350) in science and with WorldCat library holdings counts in the humanities (.304). Books recommended by Choice reviewers for undergraduates were mentioned more often in online course syllabi than were other recommended books. Similarly, books recommended for researchers, faculty members and professionals or graduates tended to receive more Google Books citations than did books recommended for undergraduates. In conclusion, metrics derived from Choice academic book reviews can be used as indicators of different aspects of the value of books but more evidence is needed before they could be used as proxies for peer judgements about individual books. Conference Topic Webometrics; Altmetrics