I’ve been noticing a lot more activity via Academia.edu (it’s a social network for academics, for those of you fortunate enough not to be one and who might not be familiar). I wonder if folks are creating new accounts or reanimating old ones partly because of recent dissatisfaction with Facebook’s ongoing privacy woes. Though ironically, Academia.edu’s account landing page currently features a Facebook Connect function that allows users to import their Facebook friends.

All that said, I’m still not sure how to use Academia.edu or what it’s for. Has anyone figured it out?

published June 1, 2010

Comments

  1. Scu

    I still don’t know how to use academia.edu. Maybe it would make more sense if I didn’t use blogging as a form of academic social networking?

    So far my profile has only been useful for finding out when someone googles me. Vain, but I don’t know what else to do with it.

  2. Robert Jackson

    I’ve been using it for a few months on and off,

    Good points;

    â?¢ Easy to see what other burgeoning academics are interested in / up to.

    â?¢ Easy way of publishing papers online so your existing links can read it.

    â?¢ They donâ??t demand you to upload everything about yourself, just the professional academic bits.

    â?¢ They notify you via email if someone has clicked/found a link to your academia.edu homepage from Google through keywords. Interesting to find out potential stalkersâ?¦

    Bad points;

    â?¢ The first two points donâ??t mean anything unless academics regularly use it.

    â?¢ Tied into the previous point, like every social networking site, every line of PHP is designed to endlessly attract your attention. Status updates, reminders etcâ?¦

    In summary then, if you are an independent researcher or PhD student then itâ??s an undeniably useful self-PR engine. If youâ??re someone like Paul Levinson, you use it to know every single academia.edu user ever.

  3. David Neville

    In theory I suppose it is a great networking site for academics who want to get their profile out there but don’t know enough HTML code or their way around Dreamweaver, say, to maintain their own website. Its advantage, I think, would be its centrality (all academics on one site) and indexing features. I found that my profile on Academia.edu gets more hits than my own university HTML site (which I track with Statcounter), but not as much as my research blog (which I also track with Statcounter). Although I have links to my professional website and research blog on my Academia.edu profile, Academia.edu is never a referring link for either of them. I get a lot of hits on papers I post on Academia.edu (mostly for problem-based learning in second language acquisition), although most viewers never venture beyond my homepage.

    My verdict? Well, it looks good on paper, but it doesn’t seem to be finding the traction it needs in the real world to make a difference. This is perhaps more due to the academics who use it (and their silo mentality) than the actual software itself.

    By the way: I’ll see you, Ian, in a few weeks at the Humanities Gaming Institute in South Carolina.

  4. Ernest Adams

    I use it to boost my slender credentials as an academic, since I’m a Visiting Professor in three places but a real one nowhere at all. 🙂