{"id":1329,"date":"2013-05-30T22:05:54","date_gmt":"2013-05-30T21:05:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jutze.com\/?p=1329"},"modified":"2013-05-30T22:08:15","modified_gmt":"2013-05-30T21:08:15","slug":"measuring-the-popularity-of-novels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/?p=1329","title":{"rendered":"Measuring the Popularity of Novels?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apparently, the amount of ratings on GoodReads.com<\/a> is highly correlated with the ratings, at least for John Green’s four novels (r<\/em> = .96)<\/a>. But is it really ‘the more, the merrier’? I picked four more authors (in a non-random fashion), had a look at the respective correlations for their novels, and made a couple of graphs to illustrate the results.<\/p>\n

\"Scatter<\/a>

Novels by John Green, Maureen Johnson, J.K. Rowling, and Stephanie Meyer<\/p><\/div>\n

The relationship is a negative one for Stephanie Meyer’s books. Two books of J.K. Rowling are outliers – her first one in terms of ratings on GoodReads, her most recent one in terms of rating. I therefore took the liberty to plot a quadratic fit (instead of a linear fit). It appears that John Green might be an exception (like the Mongols<\/a>?) Also, Amazon.com<\/a> ratings tend to be higher; and again, there is no clear relationship between the amount of reviews and the average rating.<\/p>\n

And since I recently finished reading “On Chesil Beach”, here’s the data for Ian McEwan’s novels, along with a more appropriately scaled plot for Maureen Johnson’s books:<\/p>\n

\"Scatter<\/a>

Novels by Maureen Johnson and Ian McEwan<\/p><\/div>\n

By the way, the correlation between Amazon.com ratings and GoodReads.com ratings for the 40 books I used above is r<\/em> = .89. The correlation between number of Amazon.com reviews and Goodreads.com ratings is r <\/em>= .75.<\/p>\n

PS: If anyone is interested in the Stata code for the graphs, let me know. I guess, I’ll add it here this weekend, anyway, but right now I should go to bed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Apparently, the amount of ratings on GoodReads.com is highly correlated with the ratings, at least for John Green’s four novels (r = .96). But is it really ‘the more, the merrier’? I picked four more authors (in a non-random fashion), had a look at the respective correlations for their novels, and made a couple of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,16],"tags":[513,696,520,516,519,56,517,514,515,518],"class_list":["post-1329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-data-analysis","tag-bibliometrics","tag-books","tag-correlation","tag-ian-mcewan","tag-jk-rowling","tag-john-green","tag-maureen-johnson","tag-ratings","tag-reviews","tag-stephanie-meyer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1329"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1333,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1329\/revisions\/1333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jutze.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}