article

Academia.edu: Social network or Academic Network?

Authors:

Kayvan KoushaAuthors Info & Claims

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Volume 65, Issue 4

Pages 721 - 731

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23038

Published: 01 April 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate, and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike, give scholars the ability to publicize their research outputs and connect with each other. With millions of users, these are a significant addition to the scholarly communication and academic information-seeking eco-structure. There is thus a need to understand the role that they play and the changes, if any, that they can make to the dynamics of academic careers. This article investigates attributes of philosophy scholars on Academia.edu, introducing a median-based, time-normalizing method to adjust for time delays in joining the site. In comparison to students, faculty tend to attract more profile views but female philosophers did not attract more profile views than did males, suggesting that academic capital drives philosophy uses of the site more than does friendship and networking. Secondary analyses of law, history, and computer science confirmed the faculty advantage in terms of higher profile views except for females in law and females in computer science. There was also a female advantage for both faculty and students in law and computer science as well as for history students. Hence, Academia.edu overall seems to reflect a hybrid of scholarly norms the faculty advantage and a female advantage that is suggestive of general social networking norms. Finally, traditional bibliometric measures did not correlate with any Academia.edu metrics for philosophers, perhaps because more senior academics use the site less extensively or because of the range informal scholarly activities that cannot be measured by bibliometric methods.

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cover image Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology Volume 65, Issue 4

April 2014

219 pages

ISSN:2330-1635

EISSN:2330-1643

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John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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Published: 01 April 2014

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1177/01655515211030868
Yan WWen XZhang YKudva SLiu Q(2023)The dynamics of Q&A in academic social networking sites: insights from participants, interaction network, response time, and discipline differencesScientometrics10.1007/s11192-022-04624-y128:3(1895-1922)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
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Guo YXiao X(2022)Author-level altmetrics for the evaluation of Chinese scholarsScientometrics10.1007/s11192-021-04228-y127:2(973-990)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
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