Hello, I have seen a lot of "how reliable is" questions for popular sources like movies or youtubers, and almost always the answer is "no, but you shouldn't be relying on them anyway they aren't historians". But I'd like to ask from the other side now, how popular do historians tend to get? I am not just interested in the very heights of fame for well established academics and their scholarly work, but also how well known any odd historian might be by measure of things like fellow historians attention and layman attention (articles, internet posts, videos, etc).
I was searching the internet for any reference on probably the only "scholarly" book I've read. However, Takie Sugiyama Lebra, despite Takie herself having been professor of Anthropology at the University of Hawaii and having published multiple books (I read Above the Clouds: Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility), didn't really seem to have garnered much attention in her life from non historians, and I really don't know exactly how to gage how much she got from fellow academics. I enjoyed the book but the only cross referencing I know that exists would be shallow and ill available resources like scattered public reviews, and the more reliable in theory but currently out of my reach resources on metrics like how many people have cited that book/her work in general would be great but I don't know where to go for something like that. Is Takie not actually that reliable a source and/or an outlier and most historians do have easily accessible resources available on what other people thought of their work or is it that for many scholars there just isn't that much out there in terms of other people's valuation of their work and/or scholarly accreditations are not easily accessible by the public?
This is a tricky one with no definitive answer. The caution laid about popular history books or youtubers is that the research quality can be very variable, and checking their references fully enough for accuracy would be tantamount to researching the topic yourself from scratch anyway. Even TV documentaries executive produced and presented by genuine academics are shallow and present the researcher's opinions as cast-iron facts. Sometimes this means that the TV audience gets their fringe opinion when it in fact disagrees with mainstream academia.
As far as books are concerned, the easiest way to tell an academic book from a popular history books is whether it has proper referencing. In general, there should be a foot/endnote every couple of paragraphs or more. Popular history doesn't tend to bother the audience with references the reader is never going to check. Proper academic historians do write popular history books, so it is also worth reading the "about the author" section. It'll be obvious how worthwhile the author's qualifications are.
That said, there is a lot of snobbery about academic history. If a writer trained in another research discipline applies their skills, they can still write a worthwhile book. And some historical fiction authors go deep for their works. The extent to which they're dismissed is snobbery pure and simple, but they need to be treated on a case by case basis. For example, Phillipa Gregory has done some real work on late medieval/early modern English politics and history, with an open-minded outlook that means I'll listen to her opinions over an unimaginative trout like David Starkey, who is supposedly more qualified. By contrast, I love Lindsey Davies's novels, but she makes no claims to be a researcher so anything she has to say about Vespasian's Rome in a Falco novel should be taken with a pinch of salt.
As for scholarly fame - if you're in the academic environment, you'll know what the buzz is about a given book and whether or not it's changed the landscape. The best way as a lay person is to read literary reviews in academic journals to get a feel. JSTOR is your best friend and you can read a handful of articles for free each month. To find out how well-regarded any given book has been, just search for it on JSTOR's tools and see what reviews turn up. Outside the faculty bubble, beware famous historians - they only got famous because someone put them on TV. Academic merit and TV presenting skills are not the same thing.