Writing documents for the Academia.edu website

 

The Academia.edu website provides lots of academic papers for downloading. But sometimes there is need to upload something. The reason is because it makes fun, because somebody can learn how to write a paper or because somebody likes to share it's knowledge. The only problem is that creating an academic paper from scratch is a bit hard. The following style guides explains the basics for newbie authors and somebody who likes to behave in such a way.

First thing which is important is, that a complicated two column layout is not the best option for the Academia.edu website. The reason is, that documents are displayed as default in the HTML mode and something with the rendered images is wrong, so the chance is high that precise formatted documents won't like great on the screen. The better idea is to use a minimalist layout which contains of a single column and a larger fontsize. Also it is recommended to deactivate any sort of kerning and fully justified text and use only normal wrapping mode from the document software. Such a layout can be realize with many ways for example, Word, markdown and LaTeX My personal favorite is the Lyx software but it depends on the user's experience.

The more serious problem is what to write in the document. Academia.edu is a scientiic website so it makes sense to choose on of the disciplines like mathematics, physics, literature or psychology as subject. Also it is recommended to reference to external sources which is a sign that the document was created for academic purposes. Writing the text itself is much harder to explain. A good workflow is to use existing content written in the past which was stored on the local harddrive and then convert it into an academic paper. If the user has not written any draft document in the past and the local harddrive doesn't contain self written notes or documents than it is not possible to write an academic paper.

 

After uploading a document to Academia.edu something interesting will happen next. In contrast to the expectation the amount of readers for academic documents is low and even zero. Some blog authors are asking themself why their traffic is so low. In Academia.edu there is no problem with traffic at all because the average traffic for a document is 0 views after 6 months. That means, the author will put a lot of effort into writing a document and then it is ignored by the world.

The problem is not located in the website itself but it has to do with academic content in general. That means academic papers in general are producing no traffic at all. Even Acadedmia.edu has an advanced tool for measuring the daily traffic the chance is high that the charts are showing nothing but zero rreadership in the world.