Evaluation of user reviews
Various systems have been proposed to evaluate the quality of user reviews so that consumers can access the best ones, avoid lower quality ones, and prevent mixing of honestly provided reviews with less honest reviews from advertisers or people with an agenda other than nonpartial evaluation.
Contents
Consumers are more satisfied by user reviews which are written in a certain way, and tend to perceive other reviews as poorly written or not persuasive.
The relationship between user reviews and the quality of a product is uncertain. For some levels of quality in some circumstances, there may be no relationship between quality and ratings. For top levels of quality, one study found that user ratings matched scientific ratings a little more than half the time.
Given a large set of multiple user reviews by different people, there are text analytics algorithms which can accurately predict which reviews come from the same individual authors.
Sentiment analysis can be used to predict the extent to which a review is favorable or critical.
Motivations for contributing a user review
Uses and gratifications theory is a discipline which considers why anyone would volunteer time to create a user review.
Case studies
Many researchers have profiled user reviews on Yelp.
Research has shown that user reviews often influence consumer purchases in the hospitality industry.
User reviews have created criticism and questioning of health care practices, when before the advent of user reviews, health care providers were rarely criticized or evaluated by users.