Academia.edu Adds Analytics To Bring Transparency To How Research Spreads | Hacker News Reader

Academia.edu Adds Analytics To Bring Transparency To How Research Spreads

techcrunch.com

21 pointsRichardPrice12 comments

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

And is there tracking code or some API available if authors don't want to/can't upload their papers to Academia.edu?

Edit: Rephrased as a general question.

We are working on an API, to allow developers to hook into our academic graph. We've thought about the use-case you are talking about, and may well try to handle it.

Cool; There might be some interesting ways to plug it into the journal publishing software I work on (pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/).

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

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