How do we correct genre definitions?

[Nick]

I'm not sure how goodreads assigns a book to a genre as that doesn't seem to be a part of the portion we can edit. There is a horrendous problem with how this is done. When reviewing the genre military three quarters of the books displayed are romance novels! It's so bad it makes the recommendations by genre - at least for the military genere - unusable. What can be done to correct this?

[Dee]

the genres are derived from crowd-sourcing of shelves, so there is nothing to be done to fix them - if people have books shelved as military and as romance, they are going to show up in both of the genres - the definitions of genre here aren't true definitions (for lack of a better word)

[Serkan]

Dee wrote: "the genres are derived from crowd-sourcing of shelves, so there is nothing to be done to fix them - if people have books shelved as military and as romance, they are going to show up in both of the..."

What happens when some people shelve a book as "sci-fi" and some others shelve it as "science fiction"? Are they merged somehow - or do they appear as different genres?

[Dee]

sometimes they show as both, sometimes the shelves have been merged

[Nick]

Dee thank you for your insight into how this works. After some further digging I found a sub-genre of military-history which seems to satisfy what I was looking for.

[Scott]

Love is war.

[rivka, Librarian Moderator]

Dee wrote: "sometimes they show as both, sometimes the shelves have been merged"

Shelves are not merged; they are linked as having the same definition. The users get to keep their unique shelves, but all the books listed under SF and scifi all will show up in the science fiction genre.

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

Not a terrible idea for authors to shelve their own books on shelves like "mystery" "biography" "SF" or whatever is appropriate. Not gaming the ratings or in any way doing anything to goodreads system. Just lets readers know what genre author thinks they belong in. And does become one of the shelf names goodreads algorithm looks at when assigning genre.

[Elizabeth (Alaska)]

Debbie (Debbie Rice) wrote: "And does become one of the shelf names goodreads algorithm looks at when assigning genre. "

Does GR ever "assign" a genre? I thought all of the genres on the book page were actually member shelvings, extrapolated/interpreted as genres.

[Ria]

I had the same question. when I clicked on Science recommendations, I got nothing but science fiction (and a little fantasy!). no actual science.

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

Gr doesn't ever exactly assign a genre that I can tell; on a book page with few ratings or shelving sometimes you'll see at the right either Top Shelves or Genre. Near as I can tell, they get a "genre" showing instead of "top shelves" whenever a member shelves on a shelf name that corresponds to a genre. I don't think it matters that much except that some of the "Explore" and book recommendations goodreads generates appear to use the genre—tiny way for an author to get a book out there (before authors get too excited, the exploring a genre and recommendations show the most popular books first so if, for example, you have a book in memoir genre, then you are way down a list topped by Anne Frank with a seven-figure plus shelving/popularity from what I remember).

[Debbie's Spurts (D.A.)]

*sigh* even during the goodreads choice awards all the romance, Hunger-Game-ish and Twilight-ish books were overwhelming the categories/genres. I swear members shelve a few über-popular books on basically every shelf and listopia and vote for them everywhere possible; comes of having avid fans I guess.

[Mars]

How about correcting translated works? I see some Tintin comics categorized as "Asian Literature > Indonesian Literature" because of the translations...

[Paula]

That is because users have shelved them that way. Genres are crowd sourced from users shelve names.

We cannot correct that

[Oni]

I was disturbed by this also, until I found the antidote!

When you click recommendation tab in goodreads bar, you have two side bars on your right side. One of them is recommendation by shelf, and the other one is recommendation by genre.

I assume the one that you are complaining is recommendation by genre which is HUGELY inaccurate. If I click SCIENCE genre, I get Hammer's Slammer, which is a sci-fi by David Drake, and (even worse) Bulfinch Medieval Mythology!

So what I do is I create my own SCIENCE shelf, based on science books which I owned or I read, and the recommendation that I get is almost 100% correct, except for one or two minor mistakes.

So, I would say, the recommendation by GENRE is almost useless is some genres, because of the inaccurate information by crowd source.

[Derek]

BTW, how does one merge genres? There are two Cthulhu Mythos subgenres nestled under Lovecraftian in the Horror genre. I actually created one of the "Cthulhu Mythos" subgenres awhile back, but there is a second one that appears to have the exact same content.

[Cait]

...I have no idea how you did that; it's only one genre, but it is indeed showing up twice. You might want to post in Feedback to get a developer to look at it.

[Amanda]

Derek wrote: "BTW, how does one merge genres? There are two Cthulhu Mythos subgenres nestled under Lovecraftian in the Horror genre. I actually created one of the "Cthulhu Mythos" subgenres awhile back, but ther..."

Fixed

Cthulhu Mythos was listed twice under Related genres for Lovecraftian

[Derek]

Thanks!

[Cait]

Amanda wrote: "Cthulhu Mythos was listed twice under Related genres for Lovecraftian"

I didn't think to check from that direction! Good catch, Amanda.

[Kent]

Does the software break up people's shelf categorizations into individual words? I can't think of any other way that a bunch of time travel books are getting suggested to me as "travel"

[Paula]

That's a question for the GR Feedback group not the librarian group