Abstract

Abstract. Online book discussion forums provide rich information on how readers think about and describe books, how books are related to other books and how people search for and recommend books. Within the Social Book Search (SBS) Lab at CLEF we analyse book search requests on the LibraryThing forums and find several types of complex search tasks where bibliometrics naturally combines with information retrieval. This paper explores how book search information needs in online book discussions are related to bibliometric analysis and how the structure of book citations in reviews and discussions can support complex book search tasks where users want to go beyond topical relevance ranking and see how books are related to each other and particularly to the books and authors they know.