Reviewing academia.edu | An Education Oriented Website

Now a days the education is made available to all by several non-profit organizations, universities, educational institutions and other several individuals/

http://www.academia.edu/ – is a website which is education oriented as the name suggests.

First thing first, this website is not totally open, it requires registration to access the content of the website. However the registration is free. You can also log into the website via your FaceBook account as well.

After registration you can access the website and can do the following stuff:

• Upload your papers so others in your field can find them
• Track the impact of your research with our powerful analytics dashboard
• Follow the latest research in your field via your News Feed

You will get your dedicated URL from where your stuff is accessible publically (and when you log in – you will be on your URL too). If you are an individual your dedicated URL is “http://independent.academia.edu/” followed by your user name.

So let us make it clear, that this website is not like other educational video websites. Those sites mainly provide videos targeted for a topic or standard or faculty. And this website (academia.edu) provides platform to the researchers to share their raw data with others. Of course Google Labs, provides a good platform but academia.edu provides a common platform to the scholars to instantly share data with each other. It is interesting to note that around 1,759,085 academics have joined the Academia.edu platform, and they have uploaded 1,519,670 papers in total (and it is growing). The website have more than 4.5 million unique visitors a month. The website came to existence in year 2008.

Actually this idea is quite different, because we know people doing their Ph.D. and doing research based work are quite secretive about their work. Of course there are valid reason behind it. So Dr. Richard Price – the CEO of academia.edu – came with a very unusual idea of having a social network of such scholars. There are several interviews of Dr. Richard available on the Internet to know more about the vision behind the website, Eg: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/2012/10/31/interview-with-richard-price-academia-edu-ceo/

The user interface is quite organized. You got to read Media link in order to know some of the features, and how they actually help the researchers in their work.

If you forget your password, resetting the password is quite easy there via registered email. Once you get reset password link, you will be logged in and landed on the profile page here you can specify new password. However we feel that the password confirmation field is required here.

There is a lot in the website for the scholars in addition to find the people working in similar discipline and finding the research material to rely on. Overall a nice website, only for scholars.