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Understanding Academia.edu and ResearchGate

← go back to the impact challenge table of contents.

We’ll be honest – we thought long and hard about including this chapter and its activities in the OU Impact Challenge. Academia.edu and ResearchGate both seem attractive to scholars, but they also have their share of disadvantages and downsides.    Ultimately, we decided to include this information, because so many of you at OU have accounts on these two sites. A quick search turns up 3,849 OU-affiliated users on Academia.edu and 4,731 on ResearchGate! But instead of diving right into the “how tos,” we think it’s especially important to place these two sites into context and preface them with important considerations.

Consideration #1: You Are Not the Customer

Consideration #2: You Might Be Breaking the Law

Another consideration with these particular services is the legality of uploading your work there. Most publishers require authors to sign a publication agreement/copyright transfer prior to a manuscript being published which outlines what you can/cannot do with your own work in the future (we will cover this in Chapter 11 of the OU Impact Challenge). Uploading your work – especially a publisher’s pdf – to a site such as Academia.edu or ResearchGate may be a violation of the terms of the publishing agreement, whereas uploading it to an institutional repository may not be (or can be negotiated not to be). Several years ago, a major academic publisher actively went after Academia.edu, requiring them to take down all of the publisher’s content that had been illegally uploaded, much to the surprise and dismay of these authors. And Academia.edu is not the only target . Earlier this year ResearchGate was set to take down nearly 7 million articles or about 40% of their content.

Consideration #3: Understand the Privacy Implications

Finally, some of these sites’ tactics are troubling from the standpoint of privacy and intellectual freedom. Personally and professionally, many find it distressing that a private company, which doesn’t adhere to the same professional ethics as librarians and other scholars do, collects information about who is reading what. Academia.edu, in particular, then offers to share that information with you if you subscribe to their “premium service.” And while their analytics dashboard doesn’t reveal readers’ names, it may provide enough information for you to know exactly who read your work.    You may decide not to pay for Academia.edu’s premium service, but even so – what you view and download will still be tracked. This may not be troubling to you (the “I’m not doing anything wrong, so I don’t care” argument), but we think it sets a bad precedent. What about tracking researchers who study terrorism? Or whistleblowing? Or even climate change? How might people at these academic social media companies create profiles and make judgments about you based on what you are reading? And what will they do with the information they collect, especially if asked for it by government entities?    We’ve posted some additional reading and resources below. And we will continue to cover some of these topics in the future, since they are highly relevant to sharing scholarly work. If you’re still interested in Academia.edu and/or ResearchGate after reading these articles, we’ve gone ahead and included those activities further down below. We’ve purposefully kept these activities brief, at least for now.     

• A Social Networking Site is Not an Open Access Repository , by Katie Fortney and Justin Gonder
• I Have a Lot of Questions: RG, ELS, SN, STM, and CRS , by Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
• Dear Scholars, Delete Your Account At Academia.Edu , by Sarah Bond
• Academia, Not Edu , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Reading, Privacy, and Scholarly Networks , by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
• Upon Leaving Academia.edu , by G. Geltner
• Should You #DeleteAcademiaEdu , by Paolo Mangiafico
• Should This Be the Last Thing You Read on Academia.edu? , by Gary Hall (downloads as a .pdf)

Make Profiles on Academia.edu and ResearchGate

You know all those things you wish your CV was smart enough to do – embed your papers, automatically give you readership statistics, and so on? Academia.edu and ResearchGate are two academic social networks that allow you to do these things and then some.    They’re also places where your some of your colleagues are spending their time. Actively participating on one or both networks may give you an opportunity to have greater reach with other researchers. And getting your publications and presentations onto these sites legally will make it easier for others to encounter your work. They do this not only through the social network they help you build, but also by improving the search engine optimization (SEO) of your research, making you much more “Googleable.”    Both platforms allow you to do the following:     

• Create a profile that summarizes your research
• Upload your publications, so others can find them
• Find and follow other researchers, so you can receive automatic updates on their new publications
• Find and read others’ publications
• See platform-specific metrics that indicate the readership and reach you have on those sites

Let’s dig into the basics of setting up profiles and uploading your work on these sites.

Getting Started on Academia.edu

Fill Out Your Profile

Now it’s time to add your OU affiliation and interests to your profile. Adding an OU affiliation will add you to a subdomain of Academia.edu which will allow you to more easily find your colleagues. The site will try to guess your affiliation based on your email address or IP address; make any corrections needed and add your department information and title.    Then, add your research interests. These are also important; they’ll help others find you and your work.

Connect With Others

Now let’s connect with your colleagues who are already on Academia.edu. You can either connect your Facebook account or an email account to Academia.edu, which will search your contacts and suggest connections.    You now have an Academia.edu profile! You can continue to spruce it up by adding more publications, as well as adding a photo of yourself, other research interests and publications, and connecting your Academia profile to the other services we’ve covered like ORCiD , GoogleScholar , Twitter , and LinkedIn . See how this might be coming together?!?

Academia.edu Homework

Now that you have a profile, set aside half an hour to explore two uses of Academia.edu:     

• Exploring “research interests” in order to discover other researchers and publications; and
• Getting more of your most important publications online; and

Make a Profile on ResearchGate

Next, we’ll help you with the other major player in the scholarly social network space, ResearchGate. ResearchGate claims 15 million users, and it will help you connect with many researchers who aren’t on Academia.edu. It can also help you understand your readers through platform-specific metrics, and confirm your status as a helpful expert in your field with their “Q&A” feature.    Given ResearchGate’s similarity to Academia.edu, we won’t rehash the basics of setting up a profile and getting your publications online. Go ahead and sign up, set up your account (remember to add detailed affiliation information and a photo), and add a publication or two.    Got your basic profile up and running? Great! Let’s drill down into those three unique features of ResearchGate.

Find other researchers & publications

• Top co-authors

ResearchGate Score & Stats

Limitations

We’ve covered many of the limitations of Academia.edu and ResearchGate in the first section of this chapter. But there is yet another one. It has been pointed out that Academia.edu and ResearchGate are information silos – you put information and effort into the site, but you can’t easily extract and reuse it later. This is absolutely correct. That’s a big downside of these services and a great reason to make sure you’ve claimed your ORCiD in Chapter 1 .    One solution to this drawback (and the ones mentioned above) is to limit the amount of time you spend adding new content to your profiles on these sites, and instead use them as a kind of “landing page” that can simply help others find you and three or four of your most important publications. Even if you don’t have all your publications on either site, their social networking features may still be useful to make connections and increase readership for your most important work.

ResearchGate Homework

Content for the OU Impact Challenge has been derived from “ The 30-Day Impact Challenge ” by Stacy Konkiel © ImpactStory and used here under a CC BY 4.0 International License.

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Reference management. Clean and simple.

The top list of academic research databases

2. Web of Science

5. ieee xplore, 6. sciencedirect, 7. directory of open access journals (doaj), get the most out of your academic research database, frequently asked questions about academic research databases, related articles.

Whether you are writing a thesis , dissertation, or research paper it is a key task to survey prior literature and research findings. More likely than not, you will be looking for trusted resources, most likely peer-reviewed research articles.

Academic research databases make it easy to locate the literature you are looking for. We have compiled the top list of trusted academic resources to help you get started with your research:

Scopus is one of the two big commercial, bibliographic databases that cover scholarly literature from almost any discipline. Besides searching for research articles, Scopus also provides academic journal rankings, author profiles, and an h-index calculator .

• Coverage: 90.6 million core records
• References: N/A
• Discipline: Multidisciplinary
• Access options: Limited free preview, full access by institutional subscription only
• Provider: Elsevier

Web of Science also known as Web of Knowledge is the second big bibliographic database. Usually, academic institutions provide either access to Web of Science or Scopus on their campus network for free.

• Coverage: approx. 100 million items
• References: 1.4 billion
• Access options: institutional subscription only
• Provider: Clarivate (formerly Thomson Reuters)

PubMed is the number one resource for anyone looking for literature in medicine or biological sciences. PubMed stores abstracts and bibliographic details of more than 30 million papers and provides full text links to the publisher sites or links to the free PDF on PubMed Central (PMC) .

• Coverage: approx. 35 million items
• Discipline: Medicine and Biological Sciences
• Access options: free
• Provider: NIH

For education sciences, ERIC is the number one destination. ERIC stands for Education Resources Information Center, and is a database that specifically hosts education-related literature.

• Coverage: approx. 1.6 million items
• Discipline: Education
• Provider: U.S. Department of Education

IEEE Xplore is the leading academic database in the field of engineering and computer science. It's not only journal articles, but also conference papers, standards and books that can be search for.

• Coverage: approx. 6 million items
• Discipline: Engineering
• Provider: IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)

ScienceDirect is the gateway to the millions of academic articles published by Elsevier, 1.4 million of which are open access. Journals and books can be searched via a single interface.

• Coverage: approx. 19.5 million items

The DOAJ is an open-access academic database that can be accessed and searched for free.

• Coverage: over 8 million records
• Provider: DOAJ

JSTOR is another great resource to find research papers. Any article published before 1924 in the United States is available for free and JSTOR also offers scholarships for independent researchers.

• Coverage: more than 12 million items
• Provider: ITHAKA

Start using a reference manager like Paperpile to save, organize, and cite your references. Paperpile integrates with PubMed and many popular databases, so you can save references and PDFs directly to your library using the Paperpile buttons:

Scopus is one of the two big commercial, bibliographic databases that cover scholarly literature from almost any discipline. Beside searching for research articles, Scopus also provides academic journal rankings, author profiles, and an h-index calculator .

PubMed is the number one resource for anyone looking for literature in medicine or biological sciences. PubMed stores abstracts and bibliographic details of more than 30 million papers and provides full text links to the publisher sites or links to the free PDF on PubMed Central (PMC)

Stack Exchange Network

Stack Exchange network consists of 183 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow , the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers.

Q&A for work

Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search.

Is Academia.edu's "mentions" feature real?

I just got an email from Academia.edu saying that my name has been mentioned two times (Edit: now up to 150 papers!), but to see the mentions you have to upgrade to a premium account at 8.25AUD/month.

This seems very unlikely to me, because

• The name being mentioned is my nick name (and a very uncommon nick name!) and not my proper/working name
• I'm not an academic, and haven't published anything! I have done undergrad research and a little bit since then, but nothing published, and also nothing really worth referencing.

Is the "mentions" feature basically a scam?

I just noticed that the mentions page now says this:

We search for mentions of the name "Dannii Willis", "Willis, Dannii", "D Willis" or "Willis, D" in 20 million papers, books, drafts, theses, and syllabi on Academia, and around the web.

Which means that their count of mentions (currently fluctuating between 137 and 152 for me) must also include all of the David Willises, Dennis Willises, and Deborah Willises. What a joke!

By searching on Google for my name in quotes and site:academia.edu I did find one paper that referenced a very old blog post I had written (and forgotten I had written!) But that's only one reference instead of two.

I guess unless anyone else has more data on the illegitimacy of this feature I'll have to call it real. But still a waste of money of course!

• social-media

• 5 What do you mean by "scam"? There has been various criticism of academia.edu's "premium" features, and how it illustrates the problems of social networks that first attempt to gain traction, and then exploit their users: forbes.com/sites/drsarahbond/2017/01/23/… –  Jeromy Anglim Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 4:02
• Despite the fact that you haven't published anything, is there still any chance that people might have noticed your work (for example, because you contribute to open-source software)? –  lighthouse keeper Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 10:39
• I suspect that whatever mentions academia.edu can find you can also find by googling for your name in doublequotes. –  darij grinberg Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 12:19
• @darijgrinberg Hmm, you're right, there was one result which quoted an old blog post I wrote. –  curiousdannii Commented Jun 20, 2017 at 13:00
• 8 Scam or not, it doesn't seem like its worth the monthly fee. –  Scott Seidman Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 2:25

11 Answers 11

It is so clearly a hoax, trying to get more subscribers. Please, Academia.edu software engineers, do not try the "we make errors" card, as it is not believable.

I do believe they are legit, but this mentions baiting reeks of dark patterns . If they continue doing this, they will lose credibility with the public, and end up losing the one thing people are willing to pay for, especially in research: a trusted reputation .

This is definitely a scam. (+1 for Dominique Kenens)

I registered 7 years ago, and haven't logged in for many years. I'm definitely not a premium user. Still I have received several of such emails from academia.edu . The latest one comes just today:

A paper published by a member of the Department of Nematology department at Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources mentions the name "John Doe"

Sometimes, the emails include the words "famous", "well-known" or something like that, such as: a well-known researcher of ABC has mentioned the name "John Doe".

This is really a stupid scam because I'm in Computer Science, and I don't have time to check the dictionary what is nematology or whatever.

My name is very rare in my country (Google returns only 3 other results and none of them are doing research). Moreover, I added a hyphen to my name in publication, since our language consists of only one-syllable words. So I highly doubt that this is just a classification mistake.

I think they want me to pay for my curiosity, but I have only less than 200 citations, and Google scholar tells me immediately when a paper citing my papers appears.

• 4 FYI: Nematology is the scientific discipline concerned with the study of nematodes, or roundworms. –  Ooker Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 12:49

I'm a software engineer at Academia.edu. We have a feature which allows users to see which papers mention which users.

That feature is only available to premium users. During the first month, you can email us to cancel and we'll refund you. So users can test-drive the mentions feature, and if they decide they don't like it, they can cancel. We think it's useful, and we don't want users to be coerced into using it.

Also, we do make mistakes. Sometimes we mistake a user for another academic with the same name! But Google finding only one paper with a name on academia.edu does not mean that there is only one paper that mentions that name on the site.

• 18 Thanks. Next time we have a question about Google, I hope a Google software engineer will come and provide his side of that question! And similarly for other companies... –  GEdgar Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 0:25
• 48 As many others have said, it is not at all clear why a site whose mission statement is the support of open access would charge at all for advanced search features. Google scholar certainly does not, and the burden of proof is on your company to explain what you are offering that google scholar does not. "We think it's useful, and we don't want users to be coerced into using it." The way that you're marketing the premium account is clearly a form of coercion. Why not just offer the first month free upfront? And why not offer it to all your uses? –  Pete L. Clark Commented Sep 15, 2017 at 17:21
• 19 I am highly skeptical. I regularly get emails incorrectly asserting I’ve been mentioned in other people’s papers, and have a rather uncommon name. I closed my account because I decided your service was a scam in significant part due to this feature. –  Stella Biderman Commented Feb 19, 2018 at 1:28
• 5 Hi Jack, can you confirm they recently changed to also include mentions that just match your first name's initial? Such a change must have greatly increased the false positives for many people. –  curiousdannii Commented Feb 20, 2018 at 14:43
• 4 Why are people upvoting this "answer"? Or should I say free advertising...? –  Herman Toothrot Commented Jul 6, 2018 at 12:46

I have a college email address that was used when I was researching one paper, so I was easily able to look back at the number of times I get emails from Academia.edu, telling me that my name has been published in a paper.

Essentially, I have gotten the email every three weeks or so for that past two years (since I did my one-off research). I have a very unique name (I'm the only one in the world with it, actually), so to be cited in papers having to do with biostatistics, allergy, immunology, cognitive functions, mental health, and more is beyond ludicrous. My research had to do with food and the arts...

I'm calling SCAM ALERT!

I agree that the "mentions" emails (1) are just trying to convince me to pay to subscribe and (2) are becoming less and less likely to be true mentions of my name. Today's was "A paper published in Biotechnology and Bioengineering mentions the name "---- --------"." (Using my real first and last names.) But I know for a fact that I am the only person in the world with my name if you include my first and last names, because they are a mix of ethnicities. And that includes all people who have ever lived, until a distant cousin happens to name someone with my first name - which isn't bloody likely.

And yes, I am a researcher, and I have a free account with Academia.edu, but my field is not at all related to Biotech/BE.

These solicitations from Academia.edu have definitely ramped up in frequency and detail in the past month, and it's really putting me off.

Total scam.

Since they have a 30-day-money-back guarantee, I have checked out the mentions to my name they have spammed me for years. There were 10-15 mentions of my name and none of the mentions were real.

When I contacted customer support to get my money back. They did a full refund but they have made an odd remark about "It is RARE for their algorithm to list mentions that are ALL fake".

Just put their fake mention emails to the spam folder, that's where it belong.

I receive these messages on a weekly basis, with texts like "mentioned in influential papers" or "mentioned in a paper published in The Journal of xxx". I have a unique name, so it is clearly not correct.

I have complained for two years about this scam-construction, but all I get is "I'll be happy to share this with our Mentions team for you" and "We apologize for any inconvenience. Please let me know how else I can help you in the meantime."

I have also asked for just a confirmation that the documents exist, bc I would gladly pay to read them, if my name really was mentioned.

Definitely scam.

Its not exactly a scam, but it is grossly exaggerating hits. I routinely get emails saying that there are hits on "Stirling Westrup", but there never are. There are often hits on 'S. Westrup' but none of them are me. Frankly, I consider this to be false advertising because what is being told in the email is completely false. If the email said "Stirling Westrup - when we search on variation on your name we get 15 hits!" It would be true, but not nearly so compelling. So, they chose false advertising over dull truth. Not a good sign for something that calls itself Academic.

AE finds mentions of my not-uncommon name, including my first initial instead of my full first name. Across the year or two that I have subscribed, AE has found several thousand mentions (not as many as Google Scholar has) of which about 10% are mentions of my actual name in various forms (first initial instead of first name, etc.). I consider the AE service cost-effective.

I get e-mails from a.e every few weeks saying someone mentioned by name, trying to entice me to pay in order to learn more. I already try to keep track of who cites me. It's easy because few people do. :) It was easy to figure out which citations a.e meant every time.

they were all legitimate. My last name is relatively rare, but I do have some prolifically publishing relatives with the same last name, and even one cousin in Belgium with the same first and last names. Impressively, a.e never attributed other people's papers to me.

I already know all the citations they found, and quite a few others. They missed quite a few.

They refer to the same citations differently in different e-mails, as if trying to create the false impression that they have more than they really do.

I have no plans to pay anyone to search for my citations.

I have a unique name (in the world!) and Academia.edu claimed that 109 people mentioned my name in the full text of the paper.

My research is not that interesting or popular.

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Academia.edu Grows to 175 Million Users While Gathering 32% of the World's Research Papers

New $23 M Series D funding to make every research paper ever written accessible will expedite the speed of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs around the world.

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Feb 23, 2022, 07:00 ET

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SAN FRANCISCO , Feb. 23, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Academia.edu , the academic world's platform for sharing research papers, has grown to 175 million users and is nearing half of the world's academic research content. With around 100 million papers written since the 1600s, Academia aims to make every research paper ever written freely available on the internet. This growth has attracted $23 million in Series D funding led by Tencent , bringing the total investment raised to $63 million . True Ventures and Greyrock Investments also participated in the funding round. With this new funding, the company aims to expand into allowing academics to be peer-reviewed and published in journals hosted on the Academia platform.

"What started as a personal project to share my philosophy research now provides more than fifteen times the amount of content than the number of books published each year - that inspires me," said Dr. Richard Price , founder and Chief Executive Officer, previously Oxford University academic and serial entrepreneur, "I thank our investors for continuing to back the company and its journey from the ivory towers to the information superhighway." 

What Spotify means for podcasters, SoundCloud for musicians, Etsy for artists and YouTube for content creators, Academia is inspiring the world's academics to have their work read and cited. Academia is adding 30,000-60,000 papers each day and has 28 million monthly visitors. Academia's algorithms make about 20 million paper recommendations a day, connecting users to content from 42 percent of the world's faculty in over 16,000 universities, including Oxford , MIT , Cal-Berkeley and NYU .

Across physics , chemistry , biology , health sciences , ecology , earth sciences , cognitive science , mathematics and computer science , teachers, doctors, business people and engineers can access Academia's wealth of current and historic content as well as get recommendations, enable citations, and publish their work to a global audience.

"Academia has shown that the academic world not only wants to share its research freely, but also that it's possible to build a new type of media business around this community and content," said Dr. Ling Ge, Chief European Representative at Tencent . "Readily accessible research papers will expedite the speed of scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs around the world."

For more information about Academia and its mission to accelerate research, please visit the website at academia.edu .

About Academia.edu Academia is the academic world's platform for sharing academic research papers. Academia has indexed over 32 million papers since the 1600s. Monthly, 28 million academics, professionals, and students read, share and get cited in papers accessed on Academia every month.

Academia is a venture-backed company with investors that include Tencent Holdings, Khosla Ventures, Spark Capital and True Ventures.

Media Contact Consort Partners for Academia.edu: [email protected]

SOURCE Academia.edu

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Exam papers online

Exam Papers Online provides access for staff and students of the University of Edinburgh to the collected degree examination papers of the University from 2004 onwards, They may be used by students as a study aid only.

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The majority of degree examination papers from the following academic years are now available:

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Exam Papers Online is primarily based on papers which the Library receives directly from Schools and includes papers from first, second, third year and honours years and some advanced courses. Specifically requested exclusions are not included.

Exam Papers Online is available on and off-campus. Follow the link to the exam papers you require.

You will be prompted for your EASE username and password. Remain within the same browser window and access should be seamless.

Please note: for many courses the provision of exams in Spring 2020 differs from previous years due to the Covid-19 outbreak.  The relevance of previous exam papers will vary greatly between courses so please contact your course organiser or programme administration team to find out if consulting previous exam papers will be helpful to you as a revision study aid.

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Bound volumes of older sets - up to academic year 2004/2005 - have now been removed to the University Collections Facility and may be retrieved upon request.

Further information on accessing stored material is available here:

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Where possible, the Library has made past University exam papers available online as a study aid to current students and these can be accessed by following the links above.

A request may be submitted to have a paper, or papers, removed from the web pages by emailing the address below, giving details of the academic year and course title of the paper(s) concerned and the reason for the request.

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Wednesday, August 14, 2024 | By Erin Daly

Another Spring/Summer term is ending, and another cohort of Master of Sustainability (SSAS) students in the major research paper and co-op pathway are approaching the end of their work placements. We caught up with Rebecca Anderson and Allegra Caballero and they shared with us the work they’ve been doing and how it’s inspired them to become sustainability professionals.

Allegra Caballero

Allegra Caballero  is working with the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority (NPCA) as a Land Planning Associate. In this role, she supports the NPCA’s full-time Land Planning staff in their implementation of key land planning, acquisition, and public engagement activities, and has also been helping her team plan for the development of management plans for priority conservation areas. This is done through research, policy writing, and drafting text to populate the NPCA’s main webpage.

When asked how her first year in the SSAS program prepared her for success in her co-op role, Allegra responded that “the coursework in the SSAS program has helped me gain valuable experience working on various management plans and working with others to reach a shared goal.

Rebecca Anderson

Rebecca Anderson is working for Brock University as the Sustainability Coordinator in the Facilities Management department. She described her role as being based significantly in sustainability education, “right now we are working on increasing the waste diversion rates on campus, so I am in the process of creating content like posters and online resources that will help educate staff and students on different waste streams”. Brock University is also preparing to submit for the 2025 THE Impact Rankings, and Rebecca has written a Brock News article highlighting Brock’s most recent submission.

Like Allegra, Rebecca shared that her first year in the SSAS program helped to prepare her for her co-op position, “[my courses] familiarized me with concepts like the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and technical skills like preparing and responding to requests for proposals (RFPs). These were areas I was previously unfamiliar with, but that are now core elements that we use almost daily in my current workplace”.

Allegra and Rebecca both shared how their co-op roles enriched their understanding of sustainability science and prepared them for careers in the sustainability field. “In just three short months, I have learned a tremendous amount” said Rebecca, adding “it has opened my eyes to other career options, as prior to this I had never considered working within an [academic] institution. I am appreciative of the administrative and legal concepts I have learned on the job that are crucial for tasks such as securing contracts or mandated reporting of our recycling data to the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority.” Allegra echoed this sentiment, sharing that “working with a conservation authority has helped me reimagine sustainability, the value of nature, and where an individual with my skills and abilities can contribute to its protection – I have gained new skills and abilities that I hope to bring with me into a career at a conservation authority or environmental agency”.

We are thrilled to see these students thriving in their workplaces, and look forward to hearing more from them when they return to begin their second year in the SSAS program!

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New Anthology from DEFA Film Library's Mariana Ivanova Explores Science, Media, and the Cold War

A new anthology, edited by DEFA Film Library Academic Director Mariana Ivanova and University of Lübeck, Germany's Juliane Scholz, was recently published by the prestigious academic press, Berghahn Books. "Science on Screen and Paper: Media Cultures and Knowledge Production in Cold War Europe" is the second volume in the book series Visual and Media Cultures of the Cold War and Beyond, co-sponsored by the DEFA Film Library at UMass Amherst. The anthology explores the ways in which science and media were central to the making of the Cold War, as well as to the lived experiences of persons in divided Europe. In 11 groundbreaking chapters, the volume illuminates the impact of ideological and scientific competition, as well as geopolitical and cultural differences between societies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The volume amplifies the writing of young researchers and to bring them into a transatlantic dialogue. Of the anthology, co-editor Mariana Ivanova says, “More than 30 years since the alleged end of the Cold War, twelve authors from countries in the Eastern and Western hemispheres explore intersections between scientific research and media by drawing from media history, film studies, and the history of science. They effectively draw on under-researched audio-visual and print media, such as PR, educational and science films, children’s magazines and television broadcasts to demonstrate that the Cold War was not a monolithic era, frozen in time, but rather one shaped by evolving, dynamic political and cultural processes as well as transnational protagonists and institutional relations."

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How to cite ChatGPT

Use discount code STYLEBLOG15 for 15% off APA Style print products with free shipping in the United States.

We, the APA Style team, are not robots. We can all pass a CAPTCHA test , and we know our roles in a Turing test . And, like so many nonrobot human beings this year, we’ve spent a fair amount of time reading, learning, and thinking about issues related to large language models, artificial intelligence (AI), AI-generated text, and specifically ChatGPT . We’ve also been gathering opinions and feedback about the use and citation of ChatGPT. Thank you to everyone who has contributed and shared ideas, opinions, research, and feedback.

In this post, I discuss situations where students and researchers use ChatGPT to create text and to facilitate their research, not to write the full text of their paper or manuscript. We know instructors have differing opinions about how or even whether students should use ChatGPT, and we’ll be continuing to collect feedback about instructor and student questions. As always, defer to instructor guidelines when writing student papers. For more about guidelines and policies about student and author use of ChatGPT, see the last section of this post.

Quoting or reproducing the text created by ChatGPT in your paper

If you’ve used ChatGPT or other AI tools in your research, describe how you used the tool in your Method section or in a comparable section of your paper. For literature reviews or other types of essays or response or reaction papers, you might describe how you used the tool in your introduction. In your text, provide the prompt you used and then any portion of the relevant text that was generated in response.

Unfortunately, the results of a ChatGPT “chat” are not retrievable by other readers, and although nonretrievable data or quotations in APA Style papers are usually cited as personal communications , with ChatGPT-generated text there is no person communicating. Quoting ChatGPT’s text from a chat session is therefore more like sharing an algorithm’s output; thus, credit the author of the algorithm with a reference list entry and the corresponding in-text citation.

When prompted with “Is the left brain right brain divide real or a metaphor?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that although the two brain hemispheres are somewhat specialized, “the notation that people can be characterized as ‘left-brained’ or ‘right-brained’ is considered to be an oversimplification and a popular myth” (OpenAI, 2023).

OpenAI. (2023). ChatGPT (Mar 14 version) [Large language model]. https://chat.openai.com/chat

You may also put the full text of long responses from ChatGPT in an appendix of your paper or in online supplemental materials, so readers have access to the exact text that was generated. It is particularly important to document the exact text created because ChatGPT will generate a unique response in each chat session, even if given the same prompt. If you create appendices or supplemental materials, remember that each should be called out at least once in the body of your APA Style paper.

When given a follow-up prompt of “What is a more accurate representation?” the ChatGPT-generated text indicated that “different brain regions work together to support various cognitive processes” and “the functional specialization of different regions can change in response to experience and environmental factors” (OpenAI, 2023; see Appendix A for the full transcript).

Creating a reference to ChatGPT or other AI models and software

The in-text citations and references above are adapted from the reference template for software in Section 10.10 of the Publication Manual (American Psychological Association, 2020, Chapter 10). Although here we focus on ChatGPT, because these guidelines are based on the software template, they can be adapted to note the use of other large language models (e.g., Bard), algorithms, and similar software.

The reference and in-text citations for ChatGPT are formatted as follows:

• Parenthetical citation: (OpenAI, 2023)
• Narrative citation: OpenAI (2023)

Let’s break that reference down and look at the four elements (author, date, title, and source):

Author: The author of the model is OpenAI.

Date: The date is the year of the version you used. Following the template in Section 10.10, you need to include only the year, not the exact date. The version number provides the specific date information a reader might need.

Title: The name of the model is “ChatGPT,” so that serves as the title and is italicized in your reference, as shown in the template. Although OpenAI labels unique iterations (i.e., ChatGPT-3, ChatGPT-4), they are using “ChatGPT” as the general name of the model, with updates identified with version numbers.

The version number is included after the title in parentheses. The format for the version number in ChatGPT references includes the date because that is how OpenAI is labeling the versions. Different large language models or software might use different version numbering; use the version number in the format the author or publisher provides, which may be a numbering system (e.g., Version 2.0) or other methods.

Bracketed text is used in references for additional descriptions when they are needed to help a reader understand what’s being cited. References for a number of common sources, such as journal articles and books, do not include bracketed descriptions, but things outside of the typical peer-reviewed system often do. In the case of a reference for ChatGPT, provide the descriptor “Large language model” in square brackets. OpenAI describes ChatGPT-4 as a “large multimodal model,” so that description may be provided instead if you are using ChatGPT-4. Later versions and software or models from other companies may need different descriptions, based on how the publishers describe the model. The goal of the bracketed text is to briefly describe the kind of model to your reader.

Source: When the publisher name and the author name are the same, do not repeat the publisher name in the source element of the reference, and move directly to the URL. This is the case for ChatGPT. The URL for ChatGPT is https://chat.openai.com/chat . For other models or products for which you may create a reference, use the URL that links as directly as possible to the source (i.e., the page where you can access the model, not the publisher’s homepage).

Other questions about citing ChatGPT

You may have noticed the confidence with which ChatGPT described the ideas of brain lateralization and how the brain operates, without citing any sources. I asked for a list of sources to support those claims and ChatGPT provided five references—four of which I was able to find online. The fifth does not seem to be a real article; the digital object identifier given for that reference belongs to a different article, and I was not able to find any article with the authors, date, title, and source details that ChatGPT provided. Authors using ChatGPT or similar AI tools for research should consider making this scrutiny of the primary sources a standard process. If the sources are real, accurate, and relevant, it may be better to read those original sources to learn from that research and paraphrase or quote from those articles, as applicable, than to use the model’s interpretation of them.

We’ve also received a number of other questions about ChatGPT. Should students be allowed to use it? What guidelines should instructors create for students using AI? Does using AI-generated text constitute plagiarism? Should authors who use ChatGPT credit ChatGPT or OpenAI in their byline? What are the copyright implications ?

On these questions, researchers, editors, instructors, and others are actively debating and creating parameters and guidelines. Many of you have sent us feedback, and we encourage you to continue to do so in the comments below. We will also study the policies and procedures being established by instructors, publishers, and academic institutions, with a goal of creating guidelines that reflect the many real-world applications of AI-generated text.

For questions about manuscript byline credit, plagiarism, and related ChatGPT and AI topics, the APA Style team is seeking the recommendations of APA Journals editors. APA Style guidelines based on those recommendations will be posted on this blog and on the APA Style site later this year.

Update: APA Journals has published policies on the use of generative AI in scholarly materials .

We, the APA Style team humans, appreciate your patience as we navigate these unique challenges and new ways of thinking about how authors, researchers, and students learn, write, and work with new technologies.

American Psychological Association. (2020). Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (7th ed.). https://doi.org/10.1037/0000165-000

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Larger teams in academic research worsen career prospects, study finds

Wed, 08/14/2024

LAWRENCE — As the Paris Olympics captured the world’s attention this month, it proved apparent that winning medals often hinged on the success of teamwork.

While such an approach clearly works in sports, new research suggests teamwork is not always the desired method … especially for young scientists trying to find an academic job. 

“We found that if your team size in your discipline is large, your prospects for an academic career go down,” said Donna Ginther, the Roy A. Roberts Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas.

Her paper titled “The rise of teamwork and career prospects in academic science” reveals individuals who finish their doctorate in situations where the average team in their field is larger have worse career options. The results demonstrate that academic science has not adjusted its reward structure (which is largely individual) in response to team science. The article appears in Nature Biotechnology.

“The number of authors on papers in our discipline has changed,” she said. “In econ, when I graduated, there were single-author papers. Now it’s often three to five — so it’s essentially doubled. In science fields in particular, it’s grown a lot. And when the National Institutes of Health budget doubled, papers increased by about one author.”

Co-written with Mabel Andalón, Catherine de Fontenay and Kwanghui Lim of the University of Melbourne, this research combined data on career outcomes from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients with publication data that measured research size from ISI Web of Science. It also incorporated a regression on career outcomes at the individual level to control for any changes in the characteristics of young scientists (such as whether the scientists obtained their doctorate from a top-ranked school).

“The questions we asked were if the average team size gets larger, what does it affect? Then how does it affect your career?” Ginther said.

“My co-authors Catherine de Fontenay and Kwanghui Lim developed a theoretical model where if you have large teams, it’s unclear who contributed what to the paper. That makes the signal of your scientific ability noisy. But if there are just two authors, it’s pretty clear you both did a lot of work. Then the signal of your contribution is clear.”

As a result, it’s hard to discern and give individuals credit for their contribution … and that affects their next job and whether they get research funding.

“All of the phenomena we’re seeing about the length of time it takes from the time you get your Ph.D., until you get your first academic job, until you get your first R01 — that can be explained by this growth in team size,” she said.  

Ginther recently spent six months on sabbatical in Australia, which led to a research partnership with her University of Melbourne colleagues.

“I have a whole body of work on early career scientists,” she said. “For this paper, I really liked the model we used and the intuition behind the result. The world is big and complex, and teams are an important part of it. You can’t be this kind of solitary intellectual. Teamwork is something you must be able to navigate.”

Now in her 22nd year at KU, Ginther specializes in labor economics. She is also the director of the Institute for Policy & Social Research, an interdisciplinary campus center for faculty and students doing funded work in the social and behavioral sciences.

The economist believes her findings can be applied to other professions beyond academia.

“I’d be very curious to look at the military because you always operate in teams. How does the size of your team or the composition of your team affect your career?” she said.

Ultimately, Ginther emphasizes the key takeaway of this latest research is how money is correlated with team size.

“To the extent we can make more groups of scientists that are smaller, this could lead to a policy change that is supported by our work,” she said. “Having more smaller teams may be better than megateams, both in terms of scientific discovery and career outcomes.”

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