OK, so let me define what I mean by a critical rating.
A rating that is given to an entity (be it an album, a single etc.) by a publication, in a “professional” manner of sorts for example NME, Rolling Stone, EW, The Guardian.
Now to define what we want to try and capture…
The numerical / symbolic rating given to an entity such as n/10, star rating, grade etc.
Now to define what we don’t want to try and capture…
The words of the review, a review summary.
Why?
Interesting data that can be manipulated and x-ref against reviews from users
Who’s already doing this?
Wikipedia already does this to an effect with info-boxes and then citations at the bottom of the page, and of course Metacritic might be one of the most popular examples of “rating aggregation”.
Possible Approach
We already have the Review URL relationship for RG’s, but all this does is provide an out-link to the website hosting the review.
It is possible to put the date of review using the date-start/date-end field for the URL.
There is no additional field to state the review rating, so maybe an additional field for Review relationships so you could enter the numerical rating given.
However this then prevents the inclusion of reviews in say physical media. Some physical items do exist in various online archives (either freely accessible, or paywalled and are of questionable legality); but i think linking to these might be problematic - certainly regarding the legality.
So maybe a better solution is to create the magazine/newspaper/zine in Bookbrainz, an entity for that particular issue and then point the URL to that instead, which then reveals the numerical text field for the rating.
Just something I thought about while looking through my old music mags and realising how much data is inside them that is locked within its pages.