Academia.edu: Social network or Academic Network?

Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike give scholars the ability to publicise their research outputs and connect to 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-normalising 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 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. It also found 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.