University of Tennessee, School of Information Sciences

In this Early Career Research project, Dr. Kai Li at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s School of Information Sciences will investigate a fundamental but underexplored question for libraries: how do audiences of scholars, general readers, podcast listeners, and media reviewers engage with the academic monograph? These books have traditionally been peer evaluated through scholarly book reviews published in academic journals. However, a growing ecosystem of public engagement has also emerged through public platforms that offer a source of evidence about how scholarly knowledge circulates beyond the academy. This project will construct a large-scale, openly licensed dataset linking bibliographic metadata, scholarly journal reviews, and public attention data across various platforms, enabling librarians to integrate it into their systems and workflows.