“Someone just searched for you on Google and found your page on Academia.edu.” Ever received this email and wondered how you were found? Google stopped providing us most of these terms in 2011, so for now, keep on wondering.

But, if you do wonder, then check out our newest premium feature, “Academia.edu Searches”! In the keywords tab of your analytics, you’ll see what search terms others use on Academia.edu to find your papers. This can help you understand what specifically about your work is attracting attention, and perhaps even help direct your next project.

Academia hosts a global community of faculty members, students, independent researchers, and other academics. Over 45 million people have joined the site, and more than 7 million of them have listed a university or other organization that they’re affiliated with. In all, more than 130,000 universities in over 80 countries are represented on Academia.

Given the diversity of places where Academia’s users come from, a natural question is, which universities have the largest presence on the site? Searching for a university’s name brings up its current user count, but there’s no easy way to compare universities on the site itself…

Academia’s mission is to accelerate the pace of discovery. We’ve added a new premium feature called Mentions to help you demonstrate the impact of your work. You’ll receive notifications whenever others upload papers that mention your name.

Think of Mentions as lightweight citations. You might discover that a professor acknowledged you for providing input on an earlier draft, or a colleague referred to your forthcoming work, but without a full citation, or another cited your published work in a thesis, draft, foreign language, syllabus or bibliography, and so Google Scholar ignored it. …

Academia’s mission is to accelerate the pace of the world’s research. We’ve added a new feature called ‘Reasons For Downloading’ to improve communication between authors and readers. The way it works is that readers can leave messages for authors when they download papers.

Readers have the option to tell authors what sparked their interest in the paper. These will be sent to authors as messages, who will now be able to learn much more about the impact their work is having in the world. Here are a few examples of ‘reasons for downloading’ left by readers:

A farmer in the…

On May 8, we announced the results of a year-long study of articles posted to Academia.edu. In the study, we asked whether posting an article to Academia.edu was associated with more citations. We found — after controlling for a number of factors and applying several statistical models — that a typical paper posted to the site received about 83% more citations than similar papers that were only available behind paywalls. This translated to about one extra citation every year for the median paper.

We announced the results of the study on our home page, and it was covered by Fortune…

Originally published at blog.academia.edu on June 3, 2014

Academia.edu just passed 10 million users. I remember when the site started, and a hundred or two hundred people were joining each day. Now around thirty to forty thousand people are joining each day.

The ten million milestone reflects the growing interest in open science. A few years ago open science was a niche movement. It’s now starting to be mainstream to want to share papers openly.

We need to get to a world where every science PDF ever written is on the internet, accessible for free. Why is this important? The…

We now support multiple authors on papers uploaded to Academia.edu.

In research, we stand on the shoulders of giants past. We gather together with our peers to clarify, develop, and validate new insights.

To reflect the collaborative nature of research, Academia.edu now supports adding co-authors to papers. That simple act is an act of sharing — sharing credit for work done, and sharing your research with a wider audience. Here are some ways adding co-authors will improve your experience:

Increased Exposure: Adding co-authors increases the ways that a paper can be discovered.

Saved…

You may have noticed some changes to the Academia.edu newsfeed, which we began updating early last week. The newsfeed is integral to your Academia.edu experience, so we’re writing now to let you know some of our thoughts behind the redesign.

There were many reasons for changing the design and backend architecture of the feed. Namely, we wanted to load more stories, load them faster, and create more emphasis for each item as a separate event. Each story is now contained within a separate white module so that they are more clearly distinguishable. …