There is a Journal of Marketing Research. Who knew? I didn’t until today. But it does sound like an interesting publication. And the reason I have found out about it is that it has just published a paper on the effectiveness of online reviews. The question that the researchers asked was: given a bunch of recommendations from strangers, which ones are people more likely to believe? The results they got suggested that online recommenders are judged on:

• their speed of response to queries;
• the length of their opinions;
• back-and-forth dialogue; and
• a reputation for successfully answering others’ queries

This was more to do with asking questions such as “which software package should I buy” than book reviewing, but I suspect that it may be applicable.

Sadly the researchers didn’t study the effects of reviewers having a penchant for extended rants and inciting flame wars.