Academia.edu: Social Network or Academic Network? 1 Mike Thelwall Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1LY, UK. E-mail: m.thelwall@wlv.ac.uk, Tel: +44 1902 321470 Fax: +44 1902 321478 Kayvan Kousha Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group, School of Technology, University of Wolverhampton, Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton WV1 1LY, UK E-mail: k.kousha@wlv.ac.uk Academic social network sites Academia.edu and ResearchGate and reference sharing sites Mendeley, Bibsonomy, Zotero, and CiteULike give scholars the ability to publicise their research outputs and connect to each other. With millions of users, these are a significant addition to the scholarly communication and academic information seeking eco-structure. There is thus a need to understand the role that they play and the changes, if any, that they can make to the dynamics of academic careers. This article investigates attributes of philosophy scholars on Academia.edu, introducing a median-based time-normalising method to adjust for time delays in joining the site. In comparison to students, faculty tend to attract more profile views but female philosophers did not attract more profile views than did males, suggesting that academic capital drives philosophy uses of the site more than friendship and networking. Secondary analyses of law, history and computer science confirmed the faculty advantage (in terms of higher profile views) except for females in law and females in computer science. It also found a female advantage for both faculty and students in law and computer science as well as for history students. Hence, Academia.edu overall seems to reflect a hybrid of scholarly norms (the faculty advantage) and a female advantage that is suggestive of general social networking norms. Finally, traditional bibliometric measures did not correlate with any Academia.edu metrics for philosophers, perhaps because more senior academics use the site less extensively or because of the range informal scholarly activities that cannot be measured by bibliometric methods. Introduction Web sites that seek to harness the social web for academics, such as Academia.edu, CiteULike, Mendeley, Bibsonomy, ResearchGate, and Zotero, give each member a profile and allow them to connect to each other in some way and to share information about their publications. These sites have millions of users altogether (Mangan, 2012) and so it is possible that they, like previous internet technologies such as newsgroups, (Caldas, 2003), discussion groups and mailing lists (Matzat, 2004; Fry & Talja, 2007), are having an impact upon patterns of informal scholarly communication, either in terms of information seeking and sharing or on the architecture of the invisible colleges of science (Crane, 1972). Disciplinary dimensions of scholarly communication probably help to shape the uptake and use of these and other digital environments in different ways (Kling & McKim, 2000). Nevertheless, since younger academics seem to use the internet for informal scholarly communication the most (Barjak, 2006), sites that combine informal communication and social networking with publicity for scholarly outputs seem to give an advantage to younger scholars. As a result, it is important to understand academic social web sites so that current academics can adapt to and, if necessary, adopt the new technologies. 1 This is a preprint of an article to be published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology © copyright 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.