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Comment by streptomycin | Hacker News Reader

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/).

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