At the risk of sounding daft, could someone please enlighten me on the usefulness of academia.edu for a PhD student, except obviously (I don't like the sound of this word) following  somebody' s work. What ground rules apply to this community? is it the same as following someone on Twitter or becoming a FB friends (which sometimes does not mean that you are friends in real life) but on a different level? Sorry again for being daft :$

Hi Rina,

Firstly I am not a social networking expert. (I actually ended up closing all my accounts except twitter and a blog :p!). Secondly Academia.edu is rather new for me (joined it close to an year ago but am still learning). From what I know, there do not seem to be many status updates etc. The one thing I have really found it good for is in finding latest literature of other researchers as people keep updating/adding their papers etc. So, once you subscribe to certain tags, they keep showing up when other people add papers related to them. Also, it seems (at least in my areas of interest. . .) that a lot of people are joining in (including famous people/researchers).
Another interesting (surprising) benefit of academia.edu that I discovered was that it listed my papers on google and other search engines and then lets you know if people look for your papers. I am not sure if it is of much help in research but it can be quite nice to discover people with very close research interests from all over the world (So you can cite them and keep yourself updated, which can be a help in the literature review).

Cheers

Hi Rina. I think that it is a good showcase of what you are doing. There aren't personal web-pages for doctoral or post-doctoral students at my uni, so having the possibility to let the wider academic world know what your qualifications are and what you are researching is a great opportunity.

You get an e-mail every time that your page is read by someone, so you also know how popular you are in the academic world (that is: how many other scholars are interested in what you are doing).

Personally, I find the "follow Dr x work" part the least interesting/useful. But other people may have different opinions on this. I suppose it also depends in which country you live/work and what other opportunities you have to meet and exchange ideas with other academics in your field.

I'm on the site too, but just use it as another venue for advertising my research. As a non-affiliated post doc (albeit currently with an honorary research fellowship) I think it's important for me to promote my name as much as possible. So I have profiles on Academia.edu, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. They all ultimately lead to my home page, but the more ways people can find me the better. I'm not following other people's research though, and disabled the auto email updates.

I don't use this or LinkedIn, but I'm starting to think I should. I have an aversion to 'putting myself on the internet' (my Facebook profile is very private, I tweet semi-anonymously and blog anonymously) but I'm starting to think I should be a bit more open with some aspects, in the interests of professional networking. If nothing else, there are two people in UK research with the same name as me, who I could be confused with by people who know a little about my academic background (one is even at the same uni as me). Perhaps I should do something to take charge of my online identity?

Hi Rina,

If you ask me, Academia.edu is ok, but I found that ResearchGate.net which for some reason doesn't seem to be very well-known was a lot more helpful for my research. Academia is good for finding journals and publications but it doesn't have the same high quality of discussions as ResearchGate for me, which I think is the main reason for joining one of these networks: to collaborate and interact with people who are doing similar work to yourself internationally. Researchgate has also got a literary database, a conference listing and job board for academics. But the topics in ResearchGate are great if you are having problems particularly in the lab... you can get answers immediately from peers or experts about concentration etc. Also if you are having problems with statistical analysis, you can search through the 1 million researchers on there to by their skills: so if someone wants to use the Monte Carlo Simulation for analysing their results or data they can search this and find all the researchers in their locality or institution who are specialists or working on this topic, and ask them for help/advice.

IT IS GREAT! Changed my research completely.

hope this helps Rina.