Academia.edu and ResearchGate are places where the scholarly
community can build, maintain and enhance their reputation.
The term “academic social network sites” (ASNS) encompasses a variety of online platforms which have sought to bring the benefits of online networking to a specifically academic audience
Jordan, Katy (2019)
For those who wish to communicate a corpus of work to a wider audience, social networking sites offer the opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. Many academics have used these platforms to bring the benefits of online social networking to an academic audience and use Facebook and Twitter to build, maintain and enhance their ability to share their work.
Two of the more well known academic social networks sites (ASNS) are Academia.edu and ResearchGate. Like social media sites, these platforms also offer the opportunity to leverage the benefits of social media and networks. ASNS have alternative publishing mechanisms and you can upload abstracts and articles, track demand for your published articles and engage with others in discussions, and questions and answer sessions. And you can also magnify your influence by demonstrating your motivation, expertise and commitment.
Disclaimer
Academia.edu and ResearchGate claim to be attempting to assist academics communicate their research. But they also need to be seen as platforms with an express purpose of resolving, aggregating, and sharing user identity. These are sites run by private companies and their business model is to monetize data that they have collected about you.
Upsides and downsides
Actively participating within these academic social networks offers value and offers opportunities for greater reach with other researchers. Publications that are listed on these sites allow for greater discoverability, because of the “social network” that they assist with building and the site owners work on search engine optimization (SEO). These academic social networking site make academics more “googleable”.
ASNS allow you to do the following:
- Create a profile that summarizes your research
- Upload your publications, so others can find them
- Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications
- Find and read others’ publications
- See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites
But be aware, ASNS are
- Interested more in profit, not long term access or preservation
- Interested in what's in your address book, not your privacy
- Interested in holding onto your data and do not allow libraries to extract or harvest it on the authors behalf
What's the alternative?
Scholarly repositories, on the other hand, are focused on preservation, long term access and sharing, without mining all your data. More about these repositories further on.
References
Jordan, Katy (2019). From Social Networks to Publishing Platforms: A Review of the History and Scholarship of Academic Social Network Sites. Frontiers in Education, 6, article no. 5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2019.00005