Next up for our Impact Challenge is Mendeley.

Are you surprised? While there was pushback against Mendeley after it was unexpectedly bought by Elsevier a few years ago, and it is marketed more as a reference manager than a social network, Mendeley remains popular with many academics and librarians. It offers ways to connect with other researchers that you can’t find on other platforms.

Mendeley Web (the online counterpart to the desktop reference management software) is similar to Google Scholar in several ways. What’s distinctive about Mendeley is that it offers better opportunities to interact with other researchers and get your research in front of communities that might be interested in it, in a context where they’re largely interacting with scholarship they intend to actually read and cite.

Moreover, Mendeley’s Readership Statistics can tell you a lot about the demographics that have bookmarked your work–an important indicator of who’s reading your work and who might cite it in the future.

We’re also going to talk in this post about Zotero, which is quite similar to Mendeley. We’re big supporters of Zotero because it’s an open-source non-profit, and we see that as a killer feature for science tools. However, although it really shines as a reference manager, Zotero’s community features are less powerful–mostly because they have less activity. So we’ll provide links and information on how to do some of these steps in Zotero, but not in as much detail.

Step 1: Create a profile

Logon to Mendeley.com and click the “Create a free profile” button. Create a login and, on the next screen, enter your general field of study and your academic status (student, professor, postdoc, etc).

As you advance to the next screen, beware: Mendeley Desktop will automatically start downloading to your computer. (You’ll need it to make the next step a bit easier on yourself, but you can also make do without it. Your call.) Download it and install it if you plan to use it for the next step–importing your publications.

Zotero alternative: Logon to Zotero.org, click “Register” in the upper right-hand corner, and register for an account. Once you’ve validated your new account, click your username in the upper right-hand corner (where it says, “Welcome, username!”) and then click on the “Edit Profile” link on the next screen to head to the Profile section of your Zotero settings. There, you can create a profile.

Step 2: Import your publications

If you didn’t install Mendeley Desktop, here’s how to add your references manually using Mendeley Web:

• Click the “My Library” tab, then the “Add Document” icon.

• On the “Add New Document” dialog box that appears, select “My Publications” from the “Add to” drop-down menu, then use the “Type” drop-down menu to specify what type of document you’re adding to your “My Publications” list (article, book section, thesis, etc).

• The dialog box will automatically expand, giving you many fields to fill out with descriptive information for that publication. Complete as many as possible, so others can find your publication more easily. If an Open Access link to the full-text of your publication exists, provide it in the URL box. And be sure to add a DOI, if you’ve got one. Click “Save” when finished.

• Rinse and repeat as necessary, until all your articles are added to your profile.

If you’ve got Mendeley Desktop installed, your job is much easier. Export your publications in .bib format from Google Scholar (which we covered in yesterday’s challenge), and then:

• Fire up Desktop and select “My Publications” from the “My Library” panel in the upper left corner of the screen.

• Click File > Import > BibTeX (.bib) on the main menu.

• On your computer, find the citations.bib file you exported from Google Scholar, select it, and click “Open”. Mendeley will begin to import these publications automagically.

• In the dialog box that appears, confirm that you are the author of the documents that you’re importing, and that you have the rights to share them on Mendeley. Click “I agree.”

• Click the “Sync” button at the top of the Desktop screen to Sync your local Mendeley library with your Mendeley Web library.

That’s it! You’ve just added all your publications to your Mendeley profile. And you know how to add any missing publications that didn’t auto-import, to boot.

Here’s what your profile page will look like, now that you’ve added publications to your My Publications library:

Zotero alternative: to auto-import your publications from a BiBTeX file, follow these instructions. To manually add publications, follow these instructions.

Step 3: Follow other researchers

Now you’re ready to connect with other researchers. Consider this step akin to introducing yourself at a conference over coffee: informal, done in passing, and allowing others to put a face to a name.

First, you’ll need to find others to follow. Search for colleagues or well-known researchers in your field by name from the Mendeley search bar in the upper right-hand screen of Mendeley Web:

Be sure to select “People” from the drop-down menu, so you search for profiles and not for papers that they’ve authored.

When you find their profile, click on their name in the search results, and then click the “Follow” button on the right-hand side of the profile:

That’s it! Now you’ll receive updates on your Mendeley homepage when they’ve added a new publication to their profile or done something else on the site, like join a group.

Zotero alternative: Zotero works in a very similar way. Search for your colleague, find their profile, and click the red “Follow” button at the top-right of their profile to begin following them.

Step 4: Join groups relevant to your research

If Step 3 was like introducing yourself during a conference coffee break, Step 4 is like joining a “Birds of a Feather” group over lunch, to talk about common interests and get to know each other a bit better.

Mendeley groups are places where researchers interested in a common topic can virtually congregate to post comments and share papers. It’s a good place to find researchers in your field who might be interested in your publications. And it’s also the single best place on the platform to learn about work that’s recently been published and is being talked about in your discipline.

To find a group, search for a subject using the search toolbar you used for Step 3, making sure to select “Groups” from the drop-down menu. Look through the search results and click through to group pages to determine if the group is still active (some groups were abandoned long-ago).

If so, join it! And then sit back and enjoy all the new knowledge that your fellow group members will drop on you in the coming days, which you can view from either the group page or your Mendeley homescreen.

And you can feel free to drop some knowledge on them, too. Share your articles, if relevant to the group’s scope. Pose questions and answer others’ questions. Openly solicit collaborators if you’ve got an interesting project in the pot that you need help on, like Abbas here has:

Use groups like you would any other professional networking opportunity: as a place to forge new connections with researchers you might not have a chance to meet otherwise.

Zotero alternative: Zotero works in a very similar way. Search for a group topic, find a group you want to join, and click the red “Join Group” button at the top of the page.

Step 5: Learn who’s bookmarking your work

Once your work is on Mendeley, you can learn some basic information about who’s saving it in their libraries via Mendeley’s Readership Statistics. And that’s interesting to know because Mendeley bookmarks are a leading indicator for later citations.

To see the readership demographics for your publications, head to the article’s page on Mendeley. On the right side of the screen, you’ll see a small Readership Statistics panel:

Readership Statistics can tell you how many readers you have on Mendeley (meaning, how many people have bookmarked your publication), what discipline they belong to, their academic status, and their country. Very basic information, to be sure, but it’s definitely more than you’d know about your readers if you were looking at the number of readers alone.

Zotero alternative: Zotero doesn’t yet offer readership statistics or any other altmetrics for publications on their site, but they will soon. Stay tuned!

Limitations

Perhaps the biggest limitation to Mendeley is their association with Elsevier. Mendeley was acquired by the publishing behemoth in early 2013, while the ghastly, Elsevier-backed Research Works Act fail was still fresh in many academics’ minds.

As danah boyd points out, even after Elsevier dropped support for the RWA and the “#mendelete” fracas ended, Elsevier was (and is) still doing a lot that’s not researcher-friendly. And yet, some of us continue to eat at McDonald’s knowing what goes into their chicken nuggets. Like any big organization, Elsevier does some stuff right and some stuff wrong, and it’s up to researchers to decide how it all balances out; there’s lots of room for reasonable folks to disagree. For what it’s worth: at Impactstory, one of us is a Zotero early adopter and code-contributor, one of us has switched from Mendeley to Zotero, and one of us uses both 🙂

Drawbacks to the platform itself? You can’t easily extract readership information for your publications unless you use Mendeley’s open API (too high a barrier for many of us to pass). So, you’ll need to cut-and-paste that information into your website, CV, or annual review, just as you would when using Google Scholar. (It’s relatively easy to extract readership numbers using third-party services like Impactstory, on the other hand. More on that in the days to come.)

A final drawback: if you want to add new publications, you’ll have to do it yourself. Mendeley doesn’t auto-add new publications to your profile like Google Scholar or other platforms can.

Homework

First, complete your profile by manually adding any works that the BibTeX import from Google Scholar didn’t catch.

Next, build your network by following at least five other researchers in your field, and joining at least two groups. On each of the groups you’ve joined, share at least one publication, whether it’s one you’ve authored or one written by someone else. Remember, make sure they’re relevant to the group, or else you’ll be pegged as a spammer.

Over the next few days, log onto Mendeley Web (or Zotero Web) at least one more time, and become acquainted with your homescreen timeline to stay abreast of new research that’s been added to groups or your colleagues’ profiles.

Finally, learn how to export your publications–and the rest of your library–from Mendeley, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel attempting to set up a profile for your publications on another platform. Here’s how to get your library out of Mendeley in BibTeX format:

• In Mendeley Desktop, select all publications you want to export.

• From the main menu, click File > Export.

• In the dialog box that appears, choose BibTeX from the drop-down menu, rename your bibliography if you want, and choose a safe place to store the .bib file. Click “Save” and you’re done!

Are you hangin’ in there?

You’ve now completed your Day 4 challenge, meaning you’re over halfway finished with Week 1, and over 10% finished with the entire month. That’s some free math, from us to you 🙂

Tomorrow, we’ll master LinkedIn. Get ready!

We’ve covered two of academia’s most popular social networks for the November Impact Challenge so far. Let’s now dig into the research platform that’s most often used by researchers: Google Scholar.

Google Scholar offers a popular way to create a profile that showcases your own papers and the citations they’ve received. It also calculates a platform-dependent h-index, which many researchers love to track (for better or for worse).

In today’s challenge, we’re going to get you onto Google Scholar, so you can up your scholarly SEO (aka “googleability”), more easily share your publications with new readers, and discover new citations to your work from across the entire scholarly web.

Step 1: Create your basic profile

Log on to scholar.google.com  and click the “My Citations” link at the top of the page to get your account setup started.

On the first screen, add your affiliation information and university email address, so Google Scholar can confirm your account. Add keywords that are relevant to your research interests, so others can find you when browsing a subject area. Provide a link to your university homepage, if you have one. Click “Next Step,” and–that’s it! Your basic profile is done. Now, let’s add some publications to it.

Step 2: Add publications

Google has likely already been indexing your work for some time now as part of their mission as a scholarly search engine. So, this step is pretty easy, compared to what it takes to get your work on to Academia.edu or ResearchGate.

Google Scholar will provide you with a list of publications they think belong to you. You’ll need to read through the list of publications that it suggests as yours and select which ones you want to add to your profile. Beware–if you have a common name, it’s likely there’s some publications in this list that don’t belong to you. And there’s also possibly content that you don’t want on your profile because it’s not a scholarly article, or is not representative of your current research path, and so on. Read through the publications list and deselect any that you do not want to add to your profile, like the below newsletter item that Google Scholar thinks is a scholarly article, then click the grey “Add” button at the top of your profile.

Next, confirm you want Google to automatically add new publications to your profile in the future. Note that this might add publications you didn’t author to your profile if you’ve got a very common name, but can be worth it for the time it saves you approving new articles every month.

Your profile is now almost complete! Two more steps: add a photo by clicking the “Change Photo” link on your profile homepage, and set your private profile to “Public.”

Step 3: Make your profile public

Your profile is private if you’ve just created it. Change your profile visibility by clicking “Edit” next to “My profile is private” and then selecting “My profile is public” in the drop-down box.

Bonus: Add co-authors

While your profile is technically complete, you’ll want to take advantage of Google Scholar’s built-in co-authorship network. Adding co-authors is a good way to let others know you’re now on Google Scholar, and will be useful later on in the Challenge, when we set up automatic alerts that can help you stay on top of new research in your field.

To add a suggested co-author, find the “Add Co-authors” section on the top right-hand section of your profile, then click the plus-sign next to each co-author you want to add.

That’s it! Now you’ve got a Google Scholar profile that helps you track when your work has been cited both in the peer-reviewed literature and elsewhere (more on that in a moment), and is yet another scholarly landing page that’ll connect others with your publications. The best part? Google Scholar’s pretty good at automatically adding new stuff to your profile, meaning you won’t have to do a lot of work to keep it up.

Limitations

Dirty data in the form of incorrect publications isn’t the only limitation of Google Scholar you should be aware of. The quality of Google Scholar citations has also been questioned, because they’re different from what scholars have traditionally considered to be a citation worth counting: a citation in the peer-reviewed literature.

Google Scholar counts citations from pretty much anywhere they can find them. That means their citation count often includes citations from online undergraduate papers, slides, white papers and similar sources. Because of this, Google Scholar citation counts are much higher than those from competitors like Scopus and Web of Science.

That can be a good thing. But you can also argue it’s “inflating” citation counts unfairly. It also makes Google Scholar’s citation counts quite susceptible to gaming techniques like using fake publications to fraudulently raise the numbers. We’ve not heard many evaluators complaining about these issues so far, but it’s good to be aware of.

Google Scholar also shares a limitation with ResearchGate and Academia.edu: it’s somewhat of an information silo. You cannot export your citation data, meaning that even if you were to amass very impressive citation statistics on the platform, the only way to get them onto your website, CV, or an annual report is to copy and paste them–way too much tedium for most scientists to endure. Their siloed approach to platform building definitely contributes to researchers’ profile fatigue.

Its final major limitation? There’s no telling if it will be around tomorrow. Remember Google Reader? Google has a history of killing beloved products when the bottom line is in question.  It’s not exaggerating to say that Google Scholar Profiles could literally go away at any moment.

That said, the benefits of the platform outweigh the downsides for many. And we’re going to give you a way to beat part of the “information silo” problem in today’s homework.

Homework

Google Scholar can only automate so much. To fully complete your Google Scholar profile, let’s manually add any missing articles. And let’s also teach you how to export your publication information from Google Scholar, because you’ll want to reuse it on other platforms.

1. Add missing articles

You might have an article or two that Google Scholar didn’t automatically add to your profile. If that’s the case, you’ll need to add it manually.

Click the “Add” button in the grey toolbar in the top of your profile.

On the next page, click the “Add articles manually” link in the left-hand toolbar. Then you’ll see this screen:

It’s here where you can add new papers to your profile. Include as much descriptive information as possible–it makes it easier for Google Scholar to find citations to your work. Click “Save” after you’ve finished adding your article metadata, and repeat as necessary until all of your publications are on Google Scholar.

2. Clean up your Google Scholar Profile data

Thanks to Google Scholar Profiles’ “auto add” functionality, your Profile might include some articles you didn’t author.

If that’s the case, you can remove them in one of two ways:

• clicking on the title of each offending article to get to the article’s page, and then clicking the “Delete” button in the top green bar

• from the main Profile page, ticking the boxes next to each incorrect article and selecting the “Delete” from the drop-down menu in the top grey bar

If you want to prevent incorrect articles from appearing on your profile in the first place, you can change your Profile settings to require Google Scholar to email you for approval before adding anything. To make this change, from your main Profile page, click the drop-down menu that appears in the top grey bar. Select “Profile updates”:

On the next page,  change the setting to “Don’t automatically update my profile.”

Prefer to roll the dice? You can keep a close eye on what articles are automatically added to your profile by signing up for alerts and manually removing any incorrect additions that appear. Here’s how to sign up for alerts: click the blue “Follow” button at the top of your profile, select “Follow new articles,” enter your email address, and click “Create alert.”

3. Learn how to export your publications list in BiBTeX format

There will likely be a time when you’ll want to export your Google Scholar publications to another service like Impactstory or Mendeley. Here’s how to do that.

Tick the box next to each article whose details you want to export, or tick the top left-hand box to select all articles on your profile. With the relevant articles selected, click the“Export” button like we see on the right here, then choose BiBTeX. Next, choose to export either the selected articles or all articles from your profile, then click the final “Export” button to download your “citations.bib” file.

4. Explore your citations

Your final bit of homework is to enjoy learning about all the different places you’ve been cited. Because Google Scholar indexes citations from across the entire scholarly web, there’s likely a lot of places in the world that you’re being cited, in many different publication formats.

Take some time to look not only at the numbers Google Scholar provides, but to also click through the numbers to see the actual citing publications themselves. Read them. See if you can’t connect with the authors on ResearchGate or Academia.edu, if you’re so inclined.

And if you haven’t yet been cited, don’t despair! Now that more people have the opportunity to find your research on Google Scholar and elsewhere, the citations likely aren’t far away.

In coming days, we’ll cover how to use Google Scholar to stay abreast of new research in your field and new citations to your work. Stay tuned!

Yesterday, you used Academia.edu to make new connections, find new readers for your work, and track how often your work is being read.

Today, we’ll help you master the other major player in the scholarly social network space, ResearchGate. ResearchGate, which claims 5 million scientists as users, will help you connect with many researchers who aren’t on Academia.edu (especially those outside North America). It can also help you understand your readers through platform-specific metrics, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with their “Q&A” feature.

Given ResearchGate’s similarity to Academia.edu, I won’t rehash the basics of setting up a profile and getting your publications online. Go ahead and sign up, setup your account (remember to add detailed affiliation information and a photo), and add a publication or two.

Got your basic profile up and running? Great! Let’s drill down into those three unique features of ResearchGate that you’re going to explore for your Day 2 Challenge.

Finding other researchers & publications

Finding other researchers and publications on ResearchGate works a bit differently than on Academia.edu. Rather than allow you to specify “research interests” and find other researchers that way, ResearchGate automatically creates a network for you based on who you’ve cited, who you follow and what discipline you selected when setting up your profile.

So, key to creating a robust network is uploading papers with citations to be text-mined, and searching for and following other researchers in your field.

Searching for other researchers in your field is easy: using the search bar at the top of the screen, type in your colleague’s name. If they’re on the site, they’ll appear in the dynamic search results, as we see below with Impactstory Advisor Lorena Barba:

Click on their name in the search results to be taken to their page, where you can explore their publications, co-authors, and so on, and also follow them to receive updates.

ResearchGate also text-mines the publications you’ve uploaded to find out who you’ve cited; they add both researchers you’ve cited and who have cited you to your network, as well as colleagues from your department and institution.

Here’s how to explore your network: click the “Publications” tab at the top of your screen to begin exploring the publications that are in your network. You can browse the most recent publications in your area of interest, your network, and so on, using the navigation bar seen above.

If you find an interesting publication, you can click the paper title to read the paper or click on the author’s name to be taken to their profile, where you can explore their other publications or choose to follow them, adding a new colleague to your network in a snap.

ResearchGate Score & Stats

If you’re into metrics, the ResearchGate score and stats offer lots to explore. The ResearchGate score is an indicator of your popularity and engagement on the site: the more publications and followers you have, plus the more questions you ask and answer, all add up to your score. Check out Christoph Lutz’s ResearchGate score–one of the more diversely-sourced scores I’ve seen to date:

ResearchGate also helpfully provides a percentile (seen above on the right-hand side), so you know how a score stacks up against other users on the site. The score isn’t normalized by field, though, so beware that using the score to compare yourself to others isn’t recommended.

Some other downsides to be aware of: ResearchGate scores don’t take into account whether you’re first author on a paper, they weigh site participation much more highly than other (more important) indicators of your scientific prowess, and don’t reflect the reality of who’s a high-impact scientist in many fields. So, caveat emptor.

All that said, ResearchGate scores are fun to play around with and explore. Just be sure not to take them too seriously.

The stats are also illuminating: they tell you how often your publications have been viewed and cited on ResearchGate both recently and over time, what your top publications are, and the popularity of your profile and any questions you may have asked on the site’s Q&A section. On your profile page, you’ll see a summary of your stats:

If you click on those stats, you’ll be taken to your stats page, which breaks down all of your metrics with nice visualizations:

A caveat: like Academia.edu stats, ResearchGate stats are only for content hosted on ResearchGate, so it can’t tell you much about readership or citations of your work that’s hosted on other platforms.

Q&A

Now that we’ve made some passive connections by following other researchers, let’s build some relationships by contributing to the Q&A section of the site.

On the Q&A section, anyone can pose a question, and if it’s related to your area of expertise, ResearchGate will give you the opportunity to answer. We’ll talk more about the benefits of participating in the Q&A section of the site in the coming days, but basically it’s a good opportunity to help other researchers and get your name out there.

Click on “Q&A” at the top of your screen and explore the various questions that have been posed in your discipline in recent weeks. You can also search for other topics, and pose questions yourself.

Two more cool ResearchGate features worth mentioning: they mint DOIs, meaning that if you need a permanent identifier for an unpublished work, you can get one for free (though keep in mind that they haven’t announced a preservation plan, meaning their DOIs might be less stable over time than DOIs issued by a CLOCKSSS-backed repository like Figshare). And you can also request Open Reviews of your work, which allows anyone on ResearchGate who’s in your area of expertise to give you feedback–a useful mechanism for inviting others to read your paper. It’s a feature that hasn’t seen much uptake, but is full of possibilities in terms of connecting other researchers to your work.

Limitations

Several readers have pointed out that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are information silos–you put information and effort into the site, and can’t easily extract and reuse it later. And they’re absolutely correct. That’s a big downside of these services and a great reason to check out open alternatives like PeerLibrary, ORCID, and Impactstory (more on the latter two services in the days to come).

Some other drawbacks to both Academia.edu and ResearchGate: they’re both for-profit, venture capital funded platforms, meaning that their responsibility isn’t to academics but to investors. And sure, they’re both free, which seems like an advantage until you remember that it means that you are the product, not the customer.

One solution to these drawbacks is to limit the amount of time you spend adding new content to your profiles on these sites, and instead use them as a kind of “landing page” that can simply help others find you and your three or four most important publications. Even if you don’t have all your publications on either site, their social networking features are still useful to make connections and increase readership for your most important work.

In the coming days, we’ll cover other web services that offer auto-updates and data portability, so you don’t end up suffering from Profile Fatigue.

Two more things:

1. Be sure to check your ResearchGate notification settings to cut down on spam. They send more emails than most email-fatigued academics care to receive.
2. Make sure you’ve opted-out of sending invitations, so you don’t accidentally contribute to spamming others.

Homework

Set up your ResearchGate profile and at least three publications you think deserve attention. Next, search for at least 5 colleagues or well-known researchers in your field and follow each of them. Once you’ve established a network, take 10 minutes to explore the “Publications” tab of ResearchGate, browsing publications that have been recently published in your network.

In the coming days, take another 10 minutes to explore your ResearchGate score and stats. Are there any that surprise you, in terms of what’s getting a lot of readers? How might you incorporate this information into your professional life outside of ResearchGate: would you put it on your CV or website, into an annual review or grant application in order to showcase your “broader impacts”? It’s ok if you say “no” to these ideas–the point is to get you thinking about what these metrics mean, and if and when you might use them professionally.

As for the Q&A section of ResearchGate–we’ll cover that soon. Stay tuned!

Day 2: Nailed it.

Now you’ve got connections on two of academia’s biggest social networks, and you’ve increased potential exposure for your publications, to boot. You’ve also got two new sources of metrics that’ll show how often you’re read and cited.

Are you ready for Day 3? We’re going to cover Google Scholar Profiles–a great tool for finding citations, upping your “googleability” even further, and staying on top of new publications in your field.

Until then, we welcome bragging about your ResearchGate mastery in the comments below! Questions also welcome. 🙂

PS It’s Day 2 and the November Impact Challenge is in full swing. It’s work, right? But stick with it–the work is worth it!

In 28 more days, your network and professional visibility will be in a place many scholars take years to reach, and ready to grow even more.

And today, we’d like to give you a extra little incentive. Here’s a deal: if you can finish all 30 days, we’ll hook you up with this free t-shirt to show off your achievement!

More info to come!

Welcome to the November Impact Challenge!

Over the next 30 days, we’re going to work together to supercharge your research impact. You’ll:

• upgrade your professional visibility by conquering social media,

• boost your readership and citations by getting your work online,

• stay atop your field’s latest developments with automated alerting,

• lock in the key connections with colleagues that’ll boost your career, and

• dazzle evaluators with comprehensive tracking and reporting on your own impacts.

Each day’s challenge will look like this: we’ll describe that day’s important principle–why it’s important, how you can get started, and some resources to help you excel–and then share a homework assignment, where you’ll apply the concepts we cover in that day’s post.

Are you ready? Let’s dive in, starting with scholarly social media.

Make a profile on Academia.edu

You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do–embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate (which we’ll cover in tomorrow’s challenge) are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things and a lot more.

Perhaps more importantly, they’re places where your colleagues are spending a lot of their time. Actively participating on one or both networks will give you ample opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites will make it easier for others to encounter your work, not only for the social network they help you build, but also to improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “googleable”.

Generally speaking, both platforms 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

Today, we’ll cover getting started with Academia.edu. Let’s dig into the basics of setting up a profile and uploading your work.

Basic profile setup

Logon to Academia.edu. If you’re a firm believer in keeping your professional online presence separate from your personal one, you’ll likely want to sign up using your university email address. Otherwise, you can sign up using your Facebook or Google profile.

From here, you’ll be directed through the basic signup process.

Post a publication

How do you choose what to share? If you’re an established researcher, this will be easy: just choose your most “famous” (read: highly cited) paper. If you’re a junior researcher or a student, choosing might be tougher. A peer-reviewed paper is always a good bet, as-is a preprint or a presentation that’s closely related to your most current topic of research.

Got a paper in mind? Now comes the not-as-fun-but-incredibly-necessary part: making sure you’ve got the rights to post it. Most academics don’t realize that they generally sign away their copyright when publishing an article with a traditional publisher. And that means you may not have the rights to post the publisher’s version of your article on Academia.edu. (If you negotiated to keep your copyright or published with an authors’ rights-respecting journal like PLOS Biology, give yourself a pat on the back and skip the following paragraph.)

If you don’t have copyright for your paper, all hope is not lost! You likely have the right to post your version of the article (often the unedited, unformatted version). Head over to Sherpa/Romeo and look up the journal you published in. You’ll see any and all restrictions that the publisher has placed on how you can share your article.

If you can post your article, let’s upload it to Academia.edu. Click the green “Upload a paper” button and, on your computer, find the publication you want to upload. Click “Open” and watch as Academia.edu begins to upload your paper.

Once it’s uploaded, the title of your publication will be automatically extracted. Make any corrections necessary to the title, then click in the “Find a Research Interest” box below the title. Add some keywords that will help others find your publication. Click save.

Add your affiliation and interests to your profile

Adding an affiliation is important because it will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu built for your university, and that will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title. Click “Save & Continue,” then add your research interests on the following page. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work.

Connect with colleagues

In this final step, you’ll be prompted to either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections. Select and confirm anyone you want to follow on the site. I recommend starting out small, to keep from being overwhelmed by updates.

Congrats, you’ve now got an Academia.edu profile!

You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself and other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to other services like Twitter and LinkedIn, if you’re already on ‘em. (If not, don’t worry–we’ll cover that soon.)

Homework

Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore three important uses of Academia.edu: exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; getting more of your most important publications online; and using the Analytics feature to discover who’s following you, how often others are reading and downloading your work, and in which countries your work is most popular.

Research interests: To get started exploring, click on the research interests in your profile:

For the search results that appear, take some time to explore the profiles of others who share your interest(s) and follow anyone that looks interesting. Click on the Documents tab of the search results and explore relevant papers and presentations (below is an example of what the “Human Microbiome” research interest page looks like); I’m willing to bet you’ll find many papers and connections that you weren’t aware of before.

You can also search for other research interests using the search bar at the top of the screen.

Upload more papers & presentations: click the “Upload papers” tab at the top  right corner of your screen and upload at least two more papers or presentations that you think are worthy of attention. Remember to abide by any copyright restrictions that might exist, and also be sure to add as much descriptive information as possible, adding the complete title, co-authors, and research interests for your paper, all of which will make it easier for others to find.

Analytics: click the “Analytics” tab at the top of your screen and poke around a bit. Because you just created your profile, it’s possible you won’t yet have any metrics. But in as little as a few days, you’ll begin to see download and pageview statistics for your profile and your publications (as seen below), and other interesting information like maps, all of which can help you better understand the use your work is getting from other researchers!

So–you’ve claimed your professional presence on one of academia’s biggest social networks and learned how to use it to find other researchers and publications. More importantly, you’ve optimized your profile so others can find you and your research much more easily.

Congrats! Day 1 Challenge: achievement unlocked!

Let’s see your results

Post a link to your profile in the comments, and let us know if you have any questions or tips on how to use Academia.edu.

See you tomorrow for our Day 2 challenge: mastering ResearchGate!