It has 4.8 million users--about a quarter of the 17 million academics and graduate students worldwide
That statistic looks spurious to me. Around 20% of my academia.edu contacts are 'independent researchers'. I'm not a heavy user of the site, and I pay little attention to it.
I can tell you from experience that getting buy in from mid to senior academics for this kind of thing is really tough as it doesn't add value to what they do in pre-existing ways already. The current bureaucratic cost cutting environment in universities doesn't help either.
I created an account a while back to circumvent Academia.edu's signup wall, not using my full name because I don't actually want an academia.edu page coming up when someone Googles me. I don't think I meant to "follow" Jean-Francois Delvenne of the University of Leeds, but unfortunately for Prof. Delvenne I did and now "this is a nice website for me to poop on" is one of his 37 followers (http://leeds.academia.edu/JeanFrancoisDelvenne/Followers?_pj...). And I'm not even sure this is the only account I made for this purpose.
The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?
Comments
That statistic looks spurious to me. Around 20% of my academia.edu contacts are 'independent researchers'. I'm not a heavy user of the site, and I pay little attention to it.
I can tell you from experience that getting buy in from mid to senior academics for this kind of thing is really tough as it doesn't add value to what they do in pre-existing ways already. The current bureaucratic cost cutting environment in universities doesn't help either.
I created an account a while back to circumvent Academia.edu's signup wall, not using my full name because I don't actually want an academia.edu page coming up when someone Googles me. I don't think I meant to "follow" Jean-Francois Delvenne of the University of Leeds, but unfortunately for Prof. Delvenne I did and now "this is a nice website for me to poop on" is one of his 37 followers (http://leeds.academia.edu/JeanFrancoisDelvenne/Followers?_pj...). And I'm not even sure this is the only account I made for this purpose.
The real question is, how many active weekly users does Academia.edu have?