If you aim to have successful activity in the academic sphere, you should both work on the quality of your research potential and communication tools within your field. In the digital era, almost every area and community have their networking platforms. Those platforms help people to shape networking, cooperate, be informed of industry trends and opportunities.
Below listed 5 Academic Networks will navigate your journey towards building your online presence in the academic field, if you haven't started it yet . Do not miss a chance to show your talent in front of the selected audience whom you might not reach somewhere else in real life.
Academia.edu
Academia.edu combines the role of an online repository for research works and social media platforms. In Academia, researchers publish their works, make them available to the public, monitor peers’ works, and interact with them.
A key point to clarify is that the .edu domain does not indicate that Academia.edu is an educational and non-profit organization. It includes paid services. The reason for the inconsistency is that when the domain was registered in 1999, regulations did not require the company to be accredited as a post-secondary institution to grant a top-level .edu domain.
Academia started in 2008 with the mission to make the research works available to everyone for free. It was accessible completely free until 2017, after which it switched to the freemium business model: the research materials are still available for free. However, there is an opportunity for a paid subscription with premium features. Premium subscription costs $ 9,99 (monthly subscription) or $ 8,25 (yearly subscription). Also, there is a 50% discount for graduate students, costing $ 4,13 for them.
When the platform announced the availability of paid features, there was a wave of doubt and skepticism about the fairness of its mission: to accelerate global research and make it freely accessible for everyone. However, statistics claim Academia.edu is still one of the most popular academic platforms.
There are 147 mln+ registered users, 22 mln+ uploaded resources, and 101 mln+ visitors a month. A 2016 study claims that compared to publishing in a median factor journal, an article published on Academia.edu receives 16% more citations after one year, 51% after three years, and 69% after five years.
The team of ARMACAD received an email invitation from the Academia.edu’s founder Richard Price in late 2009 to join the platform. You may read the email below:
Dear all,
Thank you for giving me this forum to speak about my website for academics. I hope it will suite you as a wonderful resource to connect to other global scholars, such as yourselves.
I recently finished my Ph.D at Oxford on the philosophy of perception. With a team of people from Stanford and Cambridge, I've just launched a website, Academia.edu, which does two things:
- It shows academics around the world structured in a 'tree' format, displayed according to their departmental and institutional affiliations.
- It enables academics to see news on the latest research in their area - the latest people, papers and talks.We are hoping that Academia.edu will eventually list every academic in the world -- Faculty Members, Post-Docs, Graduate Students, and Independent Researchers. Academics can add their departments, and themselves, to the tree by clicking on the boxes.
Academics are joining the tree rapidly. More than 24,000 academics have added themselves in the last four months. Some professors on the site include Stephen Hawking and Steven Pinker.
We're trying to spread the word about Academia.edu as much as possible. It would be terrific if you could visit the site, and add yourself to your department on the tree. If your university is not there, you can add it.
Independent researchers - if you are a researcher that is not associated with a university, I encourage you to add yourself to the "Independent Researchers" portion of the tree.
And do spread the word to your friends and colleagues if you can.
Many thanks,
Richard
ResearchGate
ResearchGate invites you to join a community of 19 million scientists on their platform. The platform in its raw statistics does not have higher numbers compared to its main competitors. However, ResearchGate has one of the most active community and platform visit frequency.
There are 150 mln+ website visits, with 70+ mln being unique visitors. According to their official statistics, 10,000 + scientists sign up to the platform every day. Altogether, they committed to creating 135 mln+ publications on the platform.
The high activity of the platform is because of their aggressive marketing promotion. ResearchGate sends 4-10 emails per week to scientists inviting them to register on the platform or notifying them about their profile statistics for several years already.
There is both interest and dissatisfaction over such an active emailing campaign of the company. In the ending result, it seems to work efficiently for the platform. According to Nature in 2014 and a Times Higher Education in 2016, ResearchGate is the largest academic, social network in active users. Also, 35% of the surveyed scientists told Nature they signed up to the platform after receiving an email.
Aside from the active emailing campaign, the platform's distinguishing points are its sign-up policy, RG score, and easy access to pdf articles.
Anyone can read the materials on the site for free. The platform makes money on its services like recruitment and advertising. However, to become a site member, one needs to sign-in with their institutional email address or prove their research activity by the site's manual settings. This is a quality indicator of the platform's registered users, proving an advertisement or recruitment of researchers on the site is highly targeted. Besides, this signals that visitors read researchers and scientists' materials with a particular academic or career level.
RG score is a number appearing on the researcher's profile, indicating the researcher's reputation on the platform based on their activity and peer-interaction. The score is changed once a week and can not be hidden or removed from the profile.
Finally, one of the key points contributing to the platform's popularity is the wide accessibility of full-version articles in pdf format. With a quick click, the user can have the full pdf article of the researcher, which increases the number of citations and searchability in Google.
Mendeley
Mendeley is a free reference manager for collecting references, organizing your citations, and creating bibliographies. It’s also an academic, social network where researchers organize their papers, collaborate with peers, and discover the latest research.
To make the citation and bibliographies generation more convenient, the platform created Citation Plugin compatible with Word (also Word for MAC) and LibreOffice.
The platform was created in 2008. After being acquired by the giant publisher Elsevier in 2013, Mendeley updated its products with iPad, iPhone, and Android apps. In 2016 Mendeley offered Mendeley Careers. In 2019, there were two more new products, Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite.
The two main functions you can benefit from in Mendeley are Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Research Network. With the Reference Manager, you can organize your references, link them to Word or BibTex library to improve your writing experience, connect citations to pdf files on your computer, etc. With Research Network, you can create and share your academic profile, search academic content on any topic, create groups to interact with peers online, view statistics.
Similar to Academia, Mendeley is a freemium platform. The free plan gives up to 2 GB of storage. There are also premium packages to upgrade the personal storage: Plus with 5 GB storage, Pro with 10 GB storage, and MAX for unlimited storage.
Academig
Academig is the newest from all of the listed platforms in the article. It was founded in 2018 and is a leading platform for finding and listing research labs.
It can be considered an academic network platform that connects the groups of researchers rather than individual ones. Academig is useful if you need to hire a group of researchers for a project, form a group with other peers, or introduce your team on the web.
The platform offers different services and purposes, depending on the company you are and what you want to introduce. For Labs, there is an opportunity to create a Lab profile by completing the existing steps. If the lab has an old website that needs an update, the platform can perform this service.
If you want to introduce your company, the platform offers a service to create a company platform. That's a great opportunity to present your company, activity, and skills to the interested audience and find international buyers for your service or product. The platform offers numerous options such as choosing a design, adding content, publishing your previous works, etc.
For departments, Academig offers a place to introduce their faculty members and researchers, along with their works. This section includes specially designed academic tools and is a great platform to increase the online presence for your academic potential.
As the platform's main purpose is to search for academic labs, there is an option for posting a job to connect the pool of qualified researchers with employers. Based on your job announcement's visibility on the platform, there are pricing packages from $ 10 to $ 100. You may find it costly, however finding researchers in Academig is beneficial compared to other hiring platforms, as the audience here is already targeted.
Publons
Publons was launched in 2012 and bought by Clarivate Analytics in 2017. It is a platform providing a free service for academics to track, verify, and present peer reviews and editorial contributions for the journals.
With this platform's help, your review and editorial activities are recorded, which you can later include in your CV for further job applications and self-promotions. In other words, the information about you in Publons can be considered the evidence of your research activities and outputs.
Creating and maintaining a platform in Publons is rather straightforward, as the tools are largely automated. It is powered by the Web of Science, ORCiD, and other integrations with thousands of academic journals. Connection to so many sources makes it probable for the platform to perform numerous activities automatically with one click.
In particular, you can import all your publications from Web of Science, ORCiD, or other bibliographic reference managers you use. Publons is considered a highly trusted citation metrics by Web of Science Core Collection. The Collection includes 21,000 world's best journals, so your activity in Publons adds status and importance to you in the academic field.
We hope a registration on the above-mentioned platforms will boost your academic career and networking. “Be in the right place, in the right moment” definitely works also for digital space.
Published on Jan 09, 2021
