Purpose: Currently, social tagging behavior, including social tag, online review and score information, has been investigated extensively. However, there are very few works about the relationship among them. In this paper, we have investigated the problem using Douban Website as the research object.

Design/methodology/approach: Firstly, we divided social tags into those with high and low frequency counts, respectively, divided books into popular and unpopular books according to books' popularity, and chose core tags in terms of distribution; Secondly, we conducted an investigation on the relationship between social tags and books scores including comprehensive analyses and assorted analyses.

Findings: The more popular the books become, the higher scores they will get. Tag frequency is not related with book scores directly, and neither does the tag distribution weight. Tags in books of “fashion” category are relatively disordered, which may associate with books miscellany and readers diversity.

Research limitations: Social tags are growing dramatically, strategies and researches to this respect are just experimental exploration. Open source books, data and educational resources are not consummate. Comparative studies are necessary, but the result may be affected by researches based on data analyses. In addition, this research has been conducted only on one website, namely Douban, and the tags provided by Douban Book are not complete. All these factors could influence the versatility of the results.

Practical implications: There are very a few studies that have been conducted on the relationship between tags and scores, this research could bring a certain practical significance to popular books prediction and tags' quality research.

Originality/value: Less attention has been paid to Chinese books while analyzing relationship between scores and tags of user generated content. Analyses based on the Chinese books may fill in the gap of better understanding the relationship between the two objects.

Purpose: Currently, social tagging behavior, including social tag, online review and score information, has been investigated extensively. However, there are very few works about the relationship among them. In this paper, we have investigated the problem using Douban Website as the research object.

Design/methodology/approach: Firstly, we divided social tags into those with high and low frequency counts, respectively, divided books into popular and unpopular books according to books' popularity, and chose core tags in terms of distribution; Secondly, we conducted an investigation on the relationship between social tags and books scores including comprehensive analyses and assorted analyses.

Findings: The more popular the books become, the higher scores they will get. Tag frequency is not related with book scores directly, and neither does the tag distribution weight. Tags in books of “fashion” category are relatively disordered, which may associate with books miscellany and readers diversity.

Research limitations: Social tags are growing dramatically, strategies and researches to this respect are just experimental exploration. Open source books, data and educational resources are not consummate. Comparative studies are necessary, but the result may be affected by researches based on data analyses. In addition, this research has been conducted only on one website, namely Douban, and the tags provided by Douban Book are not complete. All these factors could influence the versatility of the results.

Practical implications: There are very a few studies that have been conducted on the relationship between tags and scores, this research could bring a certain practical significance to popular books prediction and tags' quality research.

Originality/value: Less attention has been paid to Chinese books while analyzing relationship between scores and tags of user generated content. Analyses based on the Chinese books may fill in the gap of better understanding the relationship between the two objects.