On Research Site, Academic Popularity is a Click Away

With 31 works and 20,766 hits, the academic texts of UC Berkeley law Professor Jesse Fried have comparable statistics to those of Britney Spears superfan Chris Crocker on YouTube.

The Social Science Research Network, a Web site that is "devoted to the rapid worldwide dissemination of social science research," is sometimes used by those in academic circles to judge the popularity of their works.

The site, which was founded in 1994 as an outlet to give authors more

readership and readers easier access to the works, includes a ranking feature that ranks authors and articles by the number of times they were downloaded.

Professors said some scholars are becoming increasingly aware of their hit counts on the site, which function much like the counts on YouTube.

Authors who post on the site can compare themselves to their colleagues with just the click of a button, seeing where they fall on the researchers' academic totem pole. Out of nearly 95,000 authors and 189,741 documents, some relatively unknown authors outrank more established ones.

"I've certainly heard stories about professors when (the site) first started up who asked their students to download all their papers to make their hit count increase," said Eric Talley, a professor at Boalt Hall.

With 31 documents on the site and a total of 6,465 downloads, Talley has a site-wide ranking of 850, based on downloads per paper. He said he rarely checks his own author page.

"I'm not curious," he said. "It's kind of like Googling yourself."

Much the way YouTube contributors send out mass e-mails about their videos to increase hits, some professors have resorted to similar tactics for increasing their number of downloads, directing anyone interested in their subject to their author page on the site instead of to a personal Web site, according to Talley.

"(The rankings feature) may have been added as a gimmick to encourage more postings, so you'd get more downloads," Fried said.

Professors said lower-quality papers with existing high hit counts garner more hits than less high-profile papers.

"It's not a great barometer," Talley said. "All you really need is a really provocative title and people will download it only to reach page three and find it's nothing."

Fried said he was of the same opinion. Though he said the site's rankings could potentially be used to fuel egos, he said that people know there is a difference between quality and quantity when it comes to online academia.

He wrote a paper with a UC Berkeley graduate student and a blog picked it up, leading to an onslaught of hits.

"It got one thousand downloads," Fried said. "Does that make it more scholarly significant? No."

Both Talley and Fried said they use the site to access other scholar's works. Talley said that by doing so, he spends less time in the library, decreasing the likelihood of interacting with students.

"This is a downside to the exchange," he said. "At the same time, I now have an online interaction with my students that I never had before. It has changed the parameters. Whether the cost of those lost conversations outweighs the availability and dissemination, I don't know."

Fried, who is ranked 120 site-wide, said he does not use the site to compare himself with other authors, though he does use the site to see responses to his abstracts.

"I work hard ... I check to see how my work is received," he said. "I'm not complaining."

Tags: SOCIAL SCIENCE RESEARCH NETWORK