Yuri Niyazov, et al., reported in 2016 that Academia.edu is a website where researchers can post their articles and discover and read articles posted by others. It combines the archival role of repositories like ArXiv, SSRN, or PubMed with social networking features, such as profiles, news feeds, recommendations, and the ability to follow individuals and topics. The site launched in 2008 and as of January 2016 has approximately 30 million registered users who have uploaded approximately 8.5 million articles. Registration on the site is free and users can freely download all papers posted to the site.
There is a large body of research on the citation advantage of open access articles, and researchers are still debating the size and causes of the advantage. Some studies have found that open access articles receive substantially more citations than pay-for-access articles, even after controlling for characteristics of the articles and their authors. Other studies using experimental and quasi-experimental methods have concluded that any measured citation advantage is mostly due to selection bias and other unobserved differences between free and paid articles. Both the supportive and critical studies have focused on the accessibility of articles: once found, can the article be obtained for free? They have given less consideration to the discoverability of articles: how easily can the article be found? This makes sense; the methods researchers often use to find articles don’t privilege open access over paid sources or vice versa. Google Scholar, for example, returns both free and paid sources, as do many library databases.
Academia.edu, on the other hand, has unique features for discovering articles, making it an interesting venue for analyzing a citation advantage. Users are notified when authors they follow post articles to the site. They can then share those articles with their followers. A user can tag an article with a subject like “High Energy Physics” and users following that subject will be notified about the paper. A number of users have reported to the Academia.edu team that they observed increased citations after posting their articles to the site. Motivated by those anecdotal reports, a formal statistical analysis was conducted of the citation advantage associated with posting an article.
We find that a typical article posted on Academia.edu receives approximately 16% more citations compared to similar articles not available online in the first year after upload, rising to 51% after three years, and 69% after five years. We also find that a typical article posted on Academia.edu receives more citations than an article available online on a non-Academia.edu venue, such as a personal homepage, a departmental homepage, or a journal site. A typical paper posted only to Academia.edu receives 15% fewer citations than an article uploaded to a non-Academia.edu site in the first year, but 19% more after three years, and 35% after five years.
The authors indicate that their study was observational, requiring them to carefully account for possible sources of selection bias. They found that the citation advantage persists even after controlling for a number of possible selection biases.They have analyzed the effect of open access on citations using a novel venue for free-to-access articles, Academia.edu. Using a matching analysis and regression models with covariates to control for potential sources of selection bias, they found a substantial increase in citations associated with posting an article to Academia.edu, where a typical article posted to Academia.edu has 69% more citations than a similar paid-access article, not available elsewhere online, after five years.They also found that a typical article that is also posted to Academia.edu has 49% more citations than one that is only available elsewhere online through a non-Academia.edu venue: a personal or departmental homepage, a journal site, a repository such as ArXiV or SSRN, or any other online hosting venue. While the true effect of open access on citations remains debated in the literature, the effect they found suggests that features that improve the discoverability, such as the feeds and notifications used on Academia.edu, may be important factors in determining how much open access increases citations. They concluded that more research along these lines would help improve the understanding of the causal mechanisms behind the open access citation advantage, help researchers make better decisions about how to provide access to their research, and help journals and institutions make their open access policies more effective.
Managed & Built by I2M Consulting, LLC | © 2010-
