User Spotlight: Tim Ritchie is using Academia.edu stats in his promotion application
We receive a lot of positive feedback on our Stats Dashboard, as well great suggestions for improving it. Currently, we show users how many visitors have viewed their profile page and their papers, and from which country the visits originate.
It also displays the referring sites (where the visitor came from), which in the case of Google/Bing search results includes the search term as well as the position of the Academia.edu page in the results.
I’ll now introduce the next user in our user spotlight series: Tim Ritchie, a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Limerick. Tim has compiled the data from his dashboard. He is up for promotion later this year and needed to show evidence of the global impact of his research to the committee.
In his portfolio he included screen shots of his Academia.edu profile and summarized his stats for searches, articles found/viewed. Tim believes that these stats are a great alternative metric to standard citation counts as they reflect real-time indicators of his readership: what they are searching for and where from.
“The more evidence that I demonstrate of impact, the more likely it is that the promotion committee will realize the different ways in which impact can be shown.
Academia.edu stats proves to some of our committee members that what they help fund—the work we produce from such funding—actually gets looked for, read, printed, etc”
Tim continues that one can ”glean from Academia.edu stats new ways of conceptualizing research impact”.
Tim really likes that we show the location of the visitors to his page and papers. In his application he included a screen shot of the variety of country flags which show up on his stats dashboard. He also emphasized that he was raising the profile of his 6 year old department, worldwide.
“International researchers appreciate knowing the country and flag indicator of other people who find their papers. The flag icon per country, for me, accentuates an international community among academia. … Knowing that people from outside of my own international collaborators actually read our work intrigues and inspires me.”
We’re really happy that Tim has found a way to use the stats for his career and we wish him the best of luck with his promotion!
More and more users are letting us know how they are using the stats as evidence of their impact; for promotions, funding and new jobs. It is very exciting that academics are looking for new ways to demonstrate their impact and that we’re becoming a part of that.
If you have used Academia.edu stats to further your career, send me an email at helen@academia.edu!
The Future of Science
A version of this article appeared as a guest post on TechCrunch.
Almost every technological and medical innovation in the world has its roots in a scientific paper. Science drives much of the world’s innovation. The faster science moves, the faster the world moves.
Progress in science right now is being held back by two key inefficiencies:
- The time-lag problem: there is a time-lag of, on average, 12 months between finishing a paper, and it being published.
- The single mode of publication problem: scientists share their ideas only via one format, the scientific paper, and don’t take advantage of the full range of media that the web makes possible.
The stakes are high. If these inefficiencies can be removed, science would accelerate tremendously. A faster science would lead to faster innovation in medicine and technology. Cancer could be cured 2-3 years sooner than it otherwise would be, which would save millions of lives.
The time-lag problem
The first major inefficiency is the time-lag problem for distributing scientific ideas. After you have written a scientific paper, it takes, on average, 12 months for the paper to be distributed to the global scientific community. During that time the paper is going through the peer review process, which takes an extremely long time.
If you read a paper, and have some thoughts about it, and write up a response, it is going to take 12 months for your response to be seen by the global scientific community.
Science is fundamentally a conversation between scientists around the world. Currently the intervals between iterations of that conversation are 12 months on average. This 12 month time-lag represents a huge amount of friction in the circulation of scientific ideas.
Imagine the slowdown on the web if every blog post, and every tweet, and every photo, was made available on the web 12 months after it was originally posted. Imagine if all the stories in your Facebook News Feed were 12 months old. People would be storming the steps of Congress, demanding change.
The time-lag in the distribution of scientific ideas is significantly holding back science. It’s critical for global progress that we work to remove this inefficiency.
The single mode of publication problem
Historically, if a scientist wants to make a contribution to the scientific body of knowledge, it has to be in the form of a scientific paper.
Blogging hasn’t taken off in science, because scientists don’t get credit for writing blog posts. You often hear a scientist saying ‘I’m not going to put these ideas in a blog post, because they are good enough for me to incorporate into a paper, which I’ll publish in the next couple of years’. Everyone loses out because of that delay of a couple of years.
Most people who share information on the web have taken advantage of the rich media that the web provides. People share information in all kinds of forms: videos, status updates, blog posts, blog comments, data sets, interactive graphs, and other forms.
By contrast, if a scientist wants to share some data they have discovered, typically they will write up that data in a plain text table in a paper. The norms don’t encourage sharing of the full data-set, allowing users to explore the data for themselves. Similarly if a scientist is exploring some physical process, the norms don’t encourage the sharing of a video of that process, even if a video would be the most suitable format for that kind of information.
The future of science: instant distribution
Tim Berners-Lee invented the web in order to make it easier for him and his colleagues to share their research papers. The web has impacted science, but over the next few years, the web is going to entirely re-invent the way that scientists interact.
In 5-10 years’ time, the way scientists will communicate will be unrecognizable from the way that they have been communicating for the last 400 years, when the first academic journal was founded.
The first change will be instant distribution for all scientific ideas. Some sites, such as arXiv, Academia.edu, Mendeley, and ResearchGate have brought instant distribution to certain sub-fields of science recently, and this trend is going to continue to all fields of science.
In a few years, scientists will look back and will struggle to believe that they used to exist in a world where it took 12 months to circulate a scientific idea around the world. Discussing the idea of 12 month distribution delays for ideas will produce the same confused look that it produces today, when one asks someone to conceive of 12 month distribution delays to tweets, blog posts, and general web content.
Instant distribution means bringing the time-lag for distributing a scientific paper around the world down to 1 day, or less. This speed-up will have a transformative effect on the rate of scientific progress in the world. Discoveries will be made much more quickly.
One of the reasons that technological progress in the 20th century was so much greater than growth in previous centuries is that there were so many powerful communication technologies invented in the 20th century that connected people around the globe: the telephone, the TV, the internet.
Bringing instant distribution to science will have a similarly transformative effect on scientific progress.
The future of science: rich media
Historically scientists have written their papers as native desktop content. They have saved their papers as PDFs, and uploaded the files to the web.
Over the next few years, scientific content will increasingly become native web content, and be written natively for the web. Scientific content will be created with the full interactivity, and richness, of the web in mind. Most papers are downloaded from the web, and printed out by scientists for reading. The content was written in such a way that it’s fully readable in print-out form.
Most web content is inherently rich. No-one prints out their Twitter and Facebook News Feeds to read them, or blog posts. The idea of printing out content doesn’t make sense for much of the web’s content, such as YouTube videos, Facebook photos, interactive maps, and interactive graphs such as those on you find on Quantcast, or Yahoo Finance.
The hyperlink itself is a piece of interactivity built into web content. One reason you don’t want to print out a Wikipedia article to read it is that the page is full of useful links, and you want to be adjacent to that interactivity when reading the article to take advantage of the full power of the article.
Historically, scientific papers have cited other papers, but those citations are not hyper-linked. To citizens of the web, the idea of referring to some other page without linking to it seems an impossibly old-fashioned way of sharing content.
Imagine reading a blog, or a Facebook News Feed, where there were no links, and everything was plain text. Instead, there was a set of references at the end of the page, and those references told you were to find certain other pages on the web, but the references weren’t themselves hyperlinked. A citation to a video would something like “YouTube.com, Comedy section, page 10, “Coke bottle exploding”, video id = 34883”. You would then have to go to YouTube and navigate to the right section to get the video that has that title.
This experience would indeed be a nightmare. The difference between that, and how the web currently is, is the difference between where scientific communication is right now, and where it will be in a few years, when scientists fully adopt the rich media of the web.
Scientists will share content in whatever format makes sense for the piece of content in question. They will share ideas in the form of data sets, videos, 3-d models, software programs, graphs, blog posts, status updates, and comments on all these rich media.
The ways that these content formats will connect with each other will be via the hyperlink, and not via the citation. The citation will look like an ancient concept in a few years.
Science is undergoing one of the most exciting changes in its history. It is in a transition period between a pre-web form of communication to a natively web form of communication. The full adoption of the web by scientists will transform science. Scientists will start to interact and communicate in wonderful new ways that will have an enormous effect on scientific progress.
The future of science: peer review
In a world of instant distribution, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets published, and no-one will be able to tell whether a particular piece of content is good or bad?
I wrote a post on TechCrunch a few weeks ago called “The Future of Peer Review”, arguing that the web has an instant distribution model, and has thrived. I argued that the web’s main discovery engines for content on the web, namely search engines, and social networks, are at their heart, evolved peer review systems.
These web-scale peer review systems, search engines and social networks, already drive most discovery of scientific content. These trends will continue, and new discovery systems will emerge too.
The future of science: academic credit
Historically scientists have gained credit by publishing in prestigious journals. Hiring committees, and grant committees, historically have looked at the kinds of journals a scientist has managed to get published in as a measure of the quality of the scientist’s work. In the last few years, such committees have also started to look at citation counts too.
As scientific content moves to become native web content, scientific content will increasingly be evaluated according to the kinds of metrics that reflect the success of a piece of content on the web.
Web metrics vary, and evolve. Some are internet-wide metrics, such as unique visitors, page views, time on site. Others are specific to certain verticals, or sites, such as Twitter follower counts, StackOverflow score, Facebook likes, and YouTube video views.
As these metrics are increasingly understood in the context of scientific content, scientists will increasingly share content that attracts this kind of credit.
If you can share a data-set, and collect credit for it, you will. If you can comment on a paper, and collect credit for it, you will do that too. If sharing a video of a process is more compelling than having black and white images of the process, videos will take off.
Directing Silicon Valley’s resources towards accelerating science
Science is in the process of being re-built and transformed. It is going to be an exhilarating process. The positive impact to society will be significant.
The next wave of science is not being built by scientific publishers. It is being built by engineering-focused, Silicon Valley tech companies. It is being built by talented and visionary engineering and product teams.
Silicon Valley’s formidable resources are starting to turn in the direction of science, having been focused for the past 2-3 years on areas like optimizing strawberry credit flows on FarmVille. Venture capital, entrepreneurial talent, and engineering talent is starting to flow into the space, and the future of science is starting to be built.
The ecosystem needs more resources. It needs more engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capital. The prizes for success in transforming science go to everyone in the world. $1 trillion a year gets spent on R&D, of which $200 billion is spent in the academic sector, and $800 billion in the private sector. There are vast new companies waiting to be built here.
As the extraordinary Silicon Valley innovation engine increasingly directs itself at transforming science, you can expect to see acceleration on a scale that science has never seen. Science will change beyond recognition, and the positive impact on the rate of technology growth in the world will be enormous.
The time to act is now. If you are a VC, invest in science startups. If you are an entrepreneur, hunt for an idea in the space and run with it. If you are an engineer or designer, there is a list of startups trying to accelerate science here.
User Spotlight: Dr Chris Moores
To kick off our user spotlight series we’d like to introduce you to Dr Chris Moores. Chris is a teaching fellow in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham.
He joined Academia.edu over a year ago, hoping to create an online contact point and a place to share his research. Like many other temporary staff, Chris does not have a personal homepage provided by his University, so he looked to Academia.edu to create an online presence for his work.
The very same day that Chris signed up to Academia.edu (in Feb 2011), another user reached out to him through the site to offer him an expenses paid trip to Canada to present his work and an international conference for Human Rights! How is that for proof that Academia.edu increases scholarly communication and networking?!
Chris’ favorite things about Academia.edu are that it widens the readership of his research and it is now really easy to find him and his papers on the web (a google search for “Chris Moores” brings up his academia.edu page in the top 5 results!).
Email helen@academia.edu to tell her your story!
Speech about Academia.edu, and the Future of Science
I gave a speech about Academia.edu, and the Future of Science, at Academia.edu’s recent 1 million user party. Here is the speech.
The Dangerous “Research Works Act”
This article originally appeared as a guest post on TechCrunch here.
Poorly thought-through copyright bills seem to be popular in Congress these days.
Congress is currently considering a bill called “The Research Works Act”, whose purpose is to restrict public access to publicly-funded research. The bill is sponsored by large academic publishers who are keen to keep all research, including publicly-funded research, behind paywalls in perpetuity.
Academics are up in arms about this bill, and so are universities, and funding bodies. Over 4,500 academics have signed a pledge to boycott Elsevier, who is the largest academic publisher, and one of the main sponsors of the bill.
The open access mandate
Currently the US government provides about $30 billion of funding every year for research in biology and medicine. This funding is dispensed by a federal agency, the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
As part of its “open access mandate”, the NIH requires that any NIH-funded research has to be made freely accessible 12 months after publication. There can be a 12 month paywall, during which the publishers can recoup their costs, but after 12 months, the paywall has to come down. The thinking here is that the US taxpayer should not have to pay for research twice: once to fund it, and a second time to read it.
The aim of the Research Works Act is to reverse this open access policy, and ensure that all research remains behind publisher paywalls in perpetuity, even if it has been funded by the public.
The journal publishers have managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney (NY) and Darrell Issa (CA) that this Act is in the interests of the American public. The journal industry has two arguments in favor of the Research Works Act.
I should note that there is a handful of journal publishers who do not support the Research Works Act, listed here. The vast majority do, however, and so, for simplicity, I’m going to use “the journal industry” to refer to the majority of journal publishers who support the Research Works Act.
Journal Industry argument (1): The moral argument
The journal industry thinks that it is morally wrong for the government to ask for publicly-funded research to be freely accessible to the public.
The way the research process works is like this:
- An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant
- The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal
- The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.
The journal publishers believes that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world.
However, at step 3, the journal publishers add some value to the paper, which we can call the “publisher delta”; this delta, or added value, consists mainly in formatting and secretarial skills concerning the administering of peer review.
The publisher delta is something they own, and is the result of private investment, rather than government funding. They believe that if an academic wants to share that publisher delta with the world, they should have to ask the publisher first.
In the eyes of the journal industry, it’s unfair, and a case of unwarranted government intervention, that the government should mandate that the publisher delta has to be shared with the public after 12 months.
Journal industry argument (2): The Sustainability argument
The public has a commitment to fund scientific research, and, as part of that commitment, it is wants to ensure the successful distribution of research.
The journal industry has historically supported itself by charging for access to research papers. It believes that the government’s open access mandate threatens the sustainability of the journal industry.
In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free.
As a result of this, revenues in the journal industry will drop, leading to the whole journal industry collapsing. If the journal industry disappears, the public will lose out, as it will lose its primary distribution model for research.
The flaw in the moral argument: customers should be allowed to negotiate for better business terms
The US government provides about $30 billion of funding each year for research into biology and medicine. In return, it gets around 80,000 published articles.
In the pre-web days, it cost quite a lot to distribute papers around the world. As a result, the US government understood that, if it was going to support distribution, it was going to have to offer relatively attractive distribution terms to the journal publishers. In particular, it was going to have to allow journal publishers to keep taxpayer-funded research behind paywalls in perpetuity. It was considered that no weaker terms would cover the cost of distribution.
Now, in the days of the web, distribution of content is dramatically cheaper. Correspondingly, taxpayers should be getting better distribution terms for the money they are investing in research. In particular, they should be able to read the research they have funded for free, at some point after publication, instead of being confronted with paywalls that exist for perpetuity.
To reflect the idea that the public should be getting a better deal, the National Institutes of Health, the dispenser of the US government’s $30 billion annual biomedical research budget, enacted its open access mandate in 2008. It’s this open access mandate that the journal industry wants to reverse.
Not only this, but the purpose of the Research Works Act is to make it illegal for the US government ever to negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research.
The journal industry wants the distribution terms that made sense in the pre-web days written into law, so that the US government can never change those terms. Economically handcuffing the US government like this would be a great outcome for the journal industry, and a terrible outcome for the public.
The moral argument carries no weight: clearly a customer who is buying a product should be allowed to seek better terms. In this case the customer is the US government, who is buying published scientific articles on behalf of the public.
A monopsonistic situation
The US government does, however, have to be careful with what it asks for. It is a monopsony in this situation, i.e. a single buyer. It funds virtually all the academic research into biology and medicine in the US. It therefore gets whatever it asks for, and so it needs to be careful that what it asks for is, indeed, in the interests of the public. It does not want the journal publishers to go out of business.
This pushes the focus onto the Sustainability argument. The journal industry argues that the US government’s open access mandate jeopardizes its revenues, and thereby puts the whole scientific distribution model at risk.
The flaw in the Sustainability Argument: revenues and profits in the journal industry are at record highs
The US government’s policy has been in place since 2008, so there are 3 years of revenue data to look at.
The top three academic publishers are Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley. From 2008 to 2010:
- Their combined revenues grew 11% from $4.7 billion to $5.3 billion.
- Their profits grew 17% from $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.
It’s worth noting that these healthy revenue and profit increases occurred during a global recession.
The reasons that revenues have been rising are:
- Journal subscription prices have been going up
- The open access mandate hasn’t led departments to cancel their subscriptions
To be research-active, departments have to have the latest research. They can’t unsubscribe, and wait 12 months to get access to free research that is a year old.
The strong revenue and profit growth in the academic publishing industry leads one to wonder what Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa were thinking when they said that the US government’s open access policy would jeopardize their revenues and their business model. How did they reconcile the tale of woe that the journal industry has been telling with the annual reports of the journal publishers, which tell of growing and thriving businesses?
The strategic significance of The Research Works Act
The journal industry maintains a very strong grip on academic departments: they can keep on increasing subscription prices, and the departments have to pay up. You cannot be in business as a research institution without access to the journals. That grip currently shows no sign of loosening.
The effect of the Research Works Act would be that the journal industry would have a similarly iron grip on the US government, by making it illegal for the government to negotiate for better distribution terms for research.
Strategically the Research Works Act would be an amazing coup for the journal industry.
The journal industry has two paymasters in the US:
- the research institutions who buy the journal subscriptions
- the US government who funds almost all of the research.
The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.
Fortunately, there is another paymaster, the US government, who can negotiate for better distribution terms for taxpayer-funded research. With the journal industry squeezing departments with price hikes over the last 15 years, the US government has managed to score a win for the public with its open access mandate in 2008.
If the Research Works Act passes, the journal industry will be able to continue squeezing departments with price hikes, and the only other major negotiating force, the US government will have been gagged. It would be a genius heist by the journal industry.
What next?
The journal industry is very good at lobbying. Somehow it managed to convince two members of Congress, Carolyn Maloney, and Darrell Issa, that the Research Works Act is good for the American people. Through a lack of scrutiny and care, Maloney and Issa are willingly embracing the handcuffs that the journal industry wants the US government to wear.
The brands of the journal publishers supporting the Research Works Act are currently in free-fall within the academic community. Hopefully Congress will notice this, and apply some scrutiny to the journal industry’s arguments for the Research Works Act.
Two excellent blogs for keeping up with the discussion around the Research Works Act are:
- Tim Gowers’s blog, one of whose posts sparked the Elsevier boycott
- Michael Eisen’s blog. Michael is the founder of the open access journal, PLoS.
The Elsevier boycott is gathering momentum on The Cost of Knowledge site. A good resource page of further links is maintained by Michael Nielsen here. The text of the Research Works Act is here.
You can contact Carolyn Maloney and Darrell Issa via their webpages:
A development in the last few days is that five members of Congress have proposed a counter-bill, called Federal Research Public Access Act, which requires that virtually all federally research be accessible within 6 months of publication.
This bill would represent an improvement upon the current open access mandate from the NIH. Michael Eisen has a good summary of the bill here.
Academia.edu hits a Million users
Since our launch 3 years ago, Academia.edu has been rapidly growing and in the last 12 months we have tripled in size, as academics are flooding to join our network. Today we hit a million users!
We’d like to thank you for being a part of Academia.edu. Users are the most valuable asset of any community site and we really appreciate your role in making Academia.edu the successful research network it is today.
With over 3000 new users joining every day, we feel we must be doing something right, but there is always room for improvement. As we develop Academia.edu, its useful (and often fascinating) to learn how our users feel about the site. So we’d like take this opportunity to request your insight.
Currently our stats dashboard is receiving the most attention from our users; it seems academics are hunting for ways to prove their research has international impact and the metrics we provide are becoming invaluable! We’d love to hear about your experiences with our stats dashboard. How are the metrics affecting your career, be it for grant applications, tenure-track portfolios or publishing?
Send your stories and/or feedback to helen@academia.edu
Once again, thank you.
The Future of Peer Review
An abridged version of this post appeared on TechCrunch here.
Instant distribution
Many academics are excited about the future of instant distribution of research. Right now the time lag between finishing a paper, and the relevant worldwide research community seeing it, is between 6 months and 2 years. This is because during that time, the paper is being peer reviewed, and peer review takes an incredibly long time. 2 years is roughly how long it used to send a letter abroad 300 years ago.
Many platforms are springing up which enable research distribution to be instant, so that the time lag between finishing a paper, and everyone in the relevant research community worldwide seeing it, is measured in hours and days, rather than months and years. Academia.edu is one of these, and there are other strong platforms such as arXiv, which is focused mainly on the physics and math communities.
What about peer review?
One question many academics have is: in a future where research is distributed instantly, what happens to peer review? Will this be a world where junk gets out, and there is no way to distinguish between good and bad research?
Content discovery on the web
Instant distribution is a characteristic of web content, and the web has thrived without a system of formal peer review in place. No-one thinks that the web would be enhanced by a panel of formal peer reviewers who verify each piece of content before it was allowed to be posted on the web.
The web has thrived because powerful discovery systems have sprung up that separate the wheat from the chaff for users. The main two systems that people use to discover content on the web are:
- Search engines (Google, Bing)
- Social platforms (mainly sites like Facebook and Twitter, but also generic communication platforms like email, IM etc)
Both search engines and social platforms are peer review systems in different ways. One can think of these two systems as “Crowd Review” and “Social Review” respectively:
- Crowd Review: Google’s PageRank algorithm looks at the link structure of the entire web, and extracts a number (PageRank) that represents how positively the web thinks about a particular website.
- Social Review: Twitter and Facebook show you links that have been shared explicitly by your friends, and people you follow.
One can think of the peer review system in the journal industry as “two person review”:
- Two Person review: Two people are selected to review the paper on behalf of the entire possible audience for that paper.
The drawbacks of the Two Person review process are that it is:
- expensive: $8 billion a year is spent on subscriptions to journals, which is money that could be spent on more research.
- slow: the Two Person review process takes about 6 months to 2 years to complete, sometimes more.
- of questionable quality: the two people who are selected as peer reviewers may be biased against the paper, or unqualified, or just in a bad mood, when reviewing it.
- unchanging: the judgement is fixed, and doesn’t change as the impact of the paper changes
- a lot of work for the reviewers: it takes a lot of time to review a paper, and the review is not published, so reviewer doesn’t receive credit for their work.
More and more, academics are discovering research papers nowadays via the web, and in particular, via search engines and social platforms:
- Search engines: Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed
- Social platforms: Academia.edu, arXiv, blogs, conversations with colleagues over email or IM, Facebook and Twitter.
As research distribution has moved to the web mostly, so the discovery engines for research content are the same as those for general web content. The peer review mechanism is evolving from The Two Person review process to the Crowd Review process, and the Social Review process.
But has the research been done to a high standard?
People often say that the formal peer review process helps ensure that all the accessible research is above a certain minimum quality. The fear is that if this quality floor was removed, things would start falling apart: an academic would be reading a paper, and would have no idea whether to trust it or not.
The experience of the web is that this fear is over-blown. There is no quality floor for content on the web. There is bad content on the web, and there is great content. The job of search engines and social platforms is to ensure that the content that you discover, either via Google or Facebook, is of the good kind. The success of the web shows that the discovery engines do a good job generally.
Discovery systems and credit systems are powered by the same metrics
Peer review in the journal industry has historically played another interesting role, other than powering research discovery. It has helped an academic build up academic credit, which is required to get grants, and get jobs. People on hiring and grant committees have historically focused on how many peer reviewed publications an academic has in order to get a sense of the academic’s level of achievement, and in order to see how deserving the academic is of the grant or job in question.
The peer review system has historically played this dual role, in powering both the discovery system and the credit system, because ultimately research discovery and research credit are about the same issue: which is the good research? Whichever systems are good at answering that question will drive both the discovery system and the credit system.
One new metric of academic credit that has emerged over the last few years is the citation count. Google Scholar makes citation counts public for papers, and so now everyone can see them easily. Citations between papers are like links between websites, and citation counts are an instance of the Crowd Review process.
Legend has it that Larry Page came up with the idea of PageRank after reflecting on the analogy between citations and links. Citation counts nowadays play the dual role of driving discovery on Google Scholar, as they determine the ordering of the search results, and help to determine academic credit.
Academic credit from social platforms
In the case of social platforms, the metric that drives discovery is how much interaction there is with your content on the social platform in question. Examples of such interaction include:
- numbers of followers you have
- the number of times your content is shared, liked, commented on, viewed.
Academia.edu provides users with an analytics Dashboard, which gives them a sense of how much their content is getting interacted with: total views, total searches from Google, and other search engines, a breakdown of paper views by country. A screenshot of my Analytics dashboard is here.
Increasingly we are finding that users are taking screenshots of their Analytics Dashboards on Academia.edu, and including it in their applications for tenure track jobs. Academics are keen to demonstrate that their work is of relevance right now. Citations are a great metric, but the metric has its drawbacks. In particular, citations are a lagging indicator, in that they take a while to build up. If you publish a paper now, it is going to take several years for a body of papers to emerge that cite your paper.
This leads to academics experiencing a credit gap, where papers they have published in the last 3-4 years hardly impact their academic credit. Real time research metrics, of the kind that Academia.edu provide, fill this credit gap: they show how widely read your papers are right now, and thus provide a sense of their level of impact.
Instant Distribution and Peer Review
The prospect of instant distribution of research is tremendously exciting. If you can tap the global brain of your research community in effectively close to real time, as opposed to waiting 6 months to 24 months to distribute your ideas, there could be a wonderful acceleration in the rate of idea generation.
The web has shown that you can take out this 6 month to 24 month distribution delay, which occurs when research is undergoing the Two Person peer review process, and see high quality filtering of content done by faster, cheaper, and more personalized processes, Crowd Review and Social Review.
The web is also an incredible place for new ideas to be invented and to take hold. No doubt new peer review mechanisms will emerge in the future that will advance beyond Crowd Review and Social Review.
