Can Book Reviews be Used to Evaluate Books' Influence?

Introduction Citation frequency has become a popular index for quality evaluation of academic publications, e.g. articles, journals or books. Traditional altmetrics researches pay less attention to book-level evaluation, and they do not make use of content information. In this paper, we present a novel method, reviewmetrics, namely altmetrics to evaluate academic books based on reviews. We combine star and reviews with the information of helpfulness which is given by readers reflecting the degree of how helpful this review is (Yin, Bond, & Zhang, 2014). Correlation analysis was also conducted with citation frequencies of academic books, so as to prove the validity of reviewmetrics.