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.Publisher
WileyJournal
Journal of the Association for Information Science and TechnologyAdditional Links
http://doi.wiley.com/10.1002/asi.23038Type
Journal articleLanguage
enISSN
23301635Sponsors
This paper is supported by ACUMEN (Academic Careers Understood through Measurement and Norms) project, grant agreement number 266632, under the Seventh Framework Program of the European Union.ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1002/asi.23038