User Spotlight: Peter Mellalieu “Academia.edu provides a repository of my publications”
Peter Mellalieu is an Associate Professor in the Business Department, at Unitec, NZ. For a recent research evaluation, members of Peter’s department were encouraged to check their google scholar citations, however Peter was a little disappointed by the coverage of his publications. Google scholar only listed a few of his papers, as many of them were not digitized.
“I became somewhat désolé by the dismal number of times my papers were cited according to google scholar.”
To remedy this, Peter joined Academia.edu and spent two full days scanning and uploading all of his papers. Google scholar now lists 45 of his publications.
“I have now uploaded my lifetime of publications (approx 85). This is leading to some extraordinary outcomes. One conference paper (Mellalieu, 1998), for instance, has now been viewed over 100 times in the last 30 days. In the last month, I have received 547 views of my documents, and over 100 views of my professional profile. Eighteen people are now following what I do academically. Hopefully, these views will lead to a few more scholarly citations!… invitations to conferences, fame, fortune … and promotion!”
Peter was surprised by the interest in some of his older papers, many of which he believed to be ‘dated’. His 1970’s research on industrial development issues, promoting trade and business in New Zealand are getting high view counts in developing countries, presumably as they face similar issues today as New Zealand did 40 years ago. It is examples like this which highlight the importance of making papers widely available, one can never predict how their research may benefit others both now and in the future.
Peter also likes that by posting all of his papers on Academia.edu he can to link to them elsewhere on the internet and visitors can view the documents without needing to download them.
“Another nice feature of Academia is that all the documents are immediately available to the viewer through Scribd. No need to download the documents! Furthermore, you can link to the document view in a URL from another site.”
“I am delighted to be able to present a repository of my publications, and find that people are interested in viewing them … and have them locatable through Google etc.”
We’re pleased to have another Academia.edu ambassador, he’s sharing his satisfaction and success with Academia.edu at staff meetings and also on his blog. We also wish him luck in his hopes for Academia.edu to help him become rich and famous!
