The financial market of ideas: A theory of academic social media

Abstract

Millions of scholars use academic social media to share their work and construct themselves as legitimate and productive workers. An analysis of Academia.edu updates ideas about science as a ‘marketplace of ideas’. Scholarly communication via social media is best conceptualized as a ‘financial market of ideas’ through which academic value is assigned to publications and researchers. Academic social media allow for the inclusion of scholarly objects such as preprint articles, which exceed traditional accounting systems in scholarly communication. Their functioning is based on a valorization of derived qualities, as their algorithms analyze social interactions on the platform rather than the content of scholarship. They are also oriented toward the future in their use of data analytics to predict research outcomes.

The art of ignoring others’ work among academics: A guessing game model of scholarly information search

“…The first deals with the principal motives governing the information search. In both other models, the ultimate aim of searching the literature is instrumental, and the whole vision of information exchange among scientists is a quasi-market one (Delfanti, 2020): Scholars pay attention in order to obtain useful information, and they produce novel information oriented towards potential demand by their audiences in order to capture their attention. In this sense a parallel between attention and capital investment could be drawn: Individuals invest attention to gain more attention (Franck, 2002; Stephan, 1996).…”

A typology of research discovery tools

“…There is a multitude of such instruments, but they are seldom analysed as fully fledged research discovery tools, even though they serve the same function of research discovery, that is, the conveying of links to scientific publications. Even a mere CV or social media profile of an individual scholar [38] can be subsumed under this category: they enable a profile-based discovery of research. To use a fictitious example, the author of LM12 (which remained uncited) may have another publication, LM15 (which is highly cited), so that when people browse through that person’s CV (perhaps because they came across that person through LM15 ), they might encounter the unheard-of LM12 and start citing it over time [39,40].…”

Chaos, Care, and Critique: Performing the Contemporary Academy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…If the starting point for this research is the question of how life and work in the academy are currently articulated, then a second frame is studies of how these academic lives are performed on social media. A growing body of work explores how academics make use of digital tools and platforms, from the use of online learning tools to academic social networks such as Academia.edu (e.g., Delfanti, 2020;Lupton et al, 2017). Within this, the work of George Veletsianos (Veletsianos, 2016;Veletsianos and Kimmons, 2012) on "networked participatory scholarship" has proven particularly influential.…”