This is your platform! What would you like to see here? What are we missing?
Analytic availability
6 years ago-
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What is available and what is planned in terms of an analytics package? I’m not making a request, since I suspect your feature development queue is already excessive, but I am raising a question.
The most useful innovation I have seen in Academia.edu in the last six months is the introduction of improved analytics. Specifically, it is possible to see how many pages people are reading of specific documents. There is a big difference between a casual click on a document and actually scrolling through the whole PDF at a pace which suggests the viewer is actually reading it.
Interestingly, the newish feature on Academia.edu I find unsuccessful is the use of sessions. Either limited responses (though plenty of members of a session), or pretty bland or dumb comments. I suspect that this is down to the relative anonymity of the platform and its sheer scale. The pleasure of Humanities Commons at the moment is that I can Tweet a dumb question and get a near instantaneous reply. But at scale that won’t be possible with Humanities Commons. Again, what I like about the tiny exposure I have had to HC is the sense of the existence of scholarly communities with personalities and that one can have a discussion within those communities – it may seem strange, but I get a sense of support and engagement from my interactions on Twitter with a diverse set of scholars and non-scholars which is personal, but feel nothing personal about Academia.edu. Basically, HC feels like it has been structured around discussion, with the document repository as a support, whereas Academia.edu feels like it is structured around documents and scale of documents, with a weak culture of mutual exchange.
I would be interested if other HC, Twitter and Academia.edu users have similar or different experiences?
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Colin, I think your analysis is very accurate: one of the many problems with Academia.edu is the lack of discussion and interaction.
I also would like to have some enhanced Analytics on HC, although I also think we should undertake a reflection on the best balance between each one’s right to privacy and the undeniable utility of data on the reception of our publications etc.
I have tried Academia.edu Premium for one month and I could check who was reading any of my articles. On the one hand this could be interesting, but on the other it was a sort of spying: very likely most of the readers didn’t even imagine that I could check them. I assume that a possible solution could be allowing each reader to decider whether to reveal or not the author about one’s own reading and downloading activities.
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