

Academia.edu Adds Analytics To Bring Transparency To How Research Spreads - RichardPrice
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/17/academia-edu/

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danso
Sorry, but what are the metrics being used here? If academia is as slow as to
"get" the Internet revolution as the OP claims (and I have no doubt that this
is the situation), is it possible to make a service that easily impresses
academics even if that service is nothing more than a check-bit.ly-to-see-if-
this-hyperlink-has-been-tweeted wrapper, with some basic full-text searching
of the obvious research abstract repos?

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RichardPrice
Currently the Dashboard tracks pageviews of your papers, broken down into
various dimensions - by traffic source, by country etc. It also shows search
engine keywords that drive traffic to your page/papers.

The key thing here is that if you ask a Harvard professor, with, say, 200
publications, how many downloads she got in the last 30 days, typically she
will have no idea. The web is where most scientific research is being read and
consumed, but scientists don't have easy ways of tracking metrics around their
online influence. This dashboard is trying to change that.

The dashboard been in beta for a few months, and many users have written in
saying that they are taking screenshots of the graphs, and are including them
with their tenure track applications. Hiring and grant committees are
increasingly keen to understand the broad impact of research they fund,
ideally through a variety of different metrics: journal titles (which journal
you got published in), citation counts, and now, increasingly, metrics that
measure online influence, such as downloads. Something that surprised us a
little was that it turns out that hiring and grant committees are increasingly
interested in 'international reach'; i.e. they want to know that the research
they fund as impact beyond the immediate region of the researcher. The
dashboard helps a researcher to understand how international their audience
is.

Previously a scientist only had an anecdotal of their audience: they would
bump into people at a conference, and someone might say 'I read your paper',
and them saying that produces a very warm glow (I have been there myself!).
This dashboard is about putting numbers on your audience and reach, showing
you which are your most popular papers. Some of our beta users also mentioned
that the analytics are motivational: more people are interested in their work
than they thought.

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streptomycin
How do they get paper views/downloads data from the journals (besides the ones
that already make it public like PLoS)?

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RichardPrice
The analytics track the impact of papers that you have uploaded to
Academia.edu. More and more scientists are aware that they want a profile
where they can easily share their work, and which celebrates them as a
scientist. Academia.edu helps scientists create that online presence. The
dashboard is about helping you quantify the impact of that online presence.

Historically one has had to wait 3-5 years for citation metrics to start
trickling through for a given paper you have published. The metrics on this
dashboard are real-time. You can upload a paper to Academia.edu, and see 24
hours later that you have 100 views. As scientists get used to knowing the
real time metrics around their research, they will never go back. Real-time
metrics around distribution will be, from this point onwards, a permanent
feature of the scientific process.

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streptomycin
I still don't understand how they get paper views/downloads data from the
journals. Or is it only views for your papers in your profile on academia.edu?
That's much less interesting, as I doubt the typical academic has even heard
of accademia.edu, and it's certainly not a central hub of searching for and
reading papers.

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RichardPrice
The metrics are just for papers uploaded to Academia.edu (as stated in my
previous commment). I think real time metrics will come to other research
sharing platforms. Academia.edu is leading the way here.

I would question your assumption that academics have not heard of
Academia.edu. 1.7 million academics have signed up, and around 3,500 join each
day. It's one of the largest research sharing platforms on the web, with more
than ten times the traffic of, say, ArXiv.

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MrGunn
I think what you're doing to spread the concept of new ways of measuring
academic impact beyond citations is great, but to say you're leading the way
is a bit misleading. Mendeley has been around for years and has been
collecting information on what papers academics are actually reading,
regardless of source, not just pageviews or downloads at your site. In fact,
your site didn't start talking much about their profile pageviews until after
Mendeley launched the Institutional Edition, at which point stats had been
accumulating for years.

So again, I think it's great what you're doing, but to cast yourself as the
leader of this movement is kinda like publishing a paper and not citing any
prior work.

If people are really interested in this kind of thing, I recommend
altmetrics.org and #altmetrics

(I work for Mendeley)

~~~
RichardPrice
There are a number of sites that have historically shown simple counters for
downloads etc, and Mendeley is one of them, but Academia.edu has led the way
in terms of building a powerful analytics product that shows analytics for a
scientist's research at a relatively deep level - traffic by country, search
engine, and a variety of other dimensions.

Mendeley's Institutional Edition is completely different. It's an analytics
tool for libraries, not for individual scientists.

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propercoil
i only use that website to create no follow backlinks for seo diversity lol

