Can articles published on academia.edu be regarded as scholarly publications?

Question

I am curious to know if articles posted on academia.edu can be regarded as scholarly publications? In other words, can someone list them in his/her publication list or resume? This question may be expanded to foster a discussion of what constitutes a scholarly publication in the online literature era.

Answer 1

It does not matter where it is published, it matters (as someone already commented) whether it went through the peer review process.

There are number of outlets to "publish" your work without peer review, the one I am most familiar with is arXiv. The distinction matters, because:

1. The research that has not been peer-reviewed may be of poor quality, biased, not up to scientific standards, or simply fake. Note "may be". Scientific conferences and especially scientific journals are assumed to do peer review before accepting the paper.
2. The review process is time consuming for the reviewers, so scientific community tries to prevent "double submissions" or even double publication. The "publications" with no peer review are not considered scientific publications in strict sense, therefore they are not counted towards "double submission" criteria (at least for the conferences I know).

So the answer is, yes, you can put it in your CV, but the reader may view it differently than you, e.g. the impression may be that you are unable to publish peer-reviewed paper, and resorting to this instead.

Now, specifically to Academia.edu, due to their model as "review along the publication, not before it" makes the point moot. But nevertheless, since you CAN publish stuff on Academia.edu without prior review, no one can be sure whether the work is of high quality or junk just by the fact that you managed to publish it. Granted, sometimes junk research gets through the peer review process as well, but there is reasonable assumption that the research is good, if peer-reviewed at a decent conference or published in a decent journal, while with Academia.edu it is fair to say it is probably exactly the reverse situation: one has to assume it is junk, unless proven otherwise by going to the site and reading the comments (if any).

Answer 2

No. That site is not considered to be academic despite the name. It would not be listed on an academic CV.

I suspect the site exists only to get money from venture capitalists.

Answer 3

No, for the simple reason that it is not professionally published. Uploading to Academia.edu is as "published" as posting something on your social media pages. The problem is less the lack of peer-review specifically, but the lack of anything noticeably professional about it.

As to including Academia.edu on your CV, it would not be odd (in my field) to include your personal webpage or para-academic pages (like your personal page on Academia.edu) on your CV. Personally, I do this beside my contact information. That way an interested party could find anything of merit you have online without your having overstepped professional bounds by including papers you have privately made public online for professionally published material.

Good luck!

Answer 4

Although I have read some of the papers,those of interest to my field of research I have found to be riddled with errors and assumptions. Does not incorporate any form of peer review.

Answer 5

I disagree with the answers demanding peer review for something to be considered a scholarly publication. A conference abstract is a scholarly publication, for example, and slews of them are not peer reviewed (for example, many books written by clear experts in their fields).

I'll go out on a limb and say it makes little difference what box you would like to put academia.com articles in. Like every listing in an academic CV, people reading that CV will often attach a value of importance to every entry. If they see too many entries that they consider unimportant, they may start to think the CV is padded. If I see one academia.com pub in a list of dozens, it's no biggie. If I see five of six total entries are of that type, I would not look at that CV favorably for most typical contexts, but might love it for some other contexts.

Answer 6

Such works could be regarded as scholarly publications, and could be listed in a CV.

As others have suggested, you should be careful not to misrepresent, or even appear to misrepresent, non-peer-reviewed contributions as though they were peer-reviewed. However, especially if the papers have been submitted/are under review at a peer-reviewed journal, it can be useful to list these publications in a separate "non-peer-reviewed (preprints etc.)" section in your CV. The advantage of these entries is that, especially if you are relatively new to research and haven't published much yet, people can go and check your work for themselves.

• For what it worth academia.edu seems more geared toward serving publicly available copies of peer-reviewed works (similar to ResearchGate) than toward hosting preprints
• I have noticed that especially in mathematics, where the peer review process can be very slow, it is becoming more common for people to list ArXiv preprints in their CVs.