Is Academia.edu useful?

I distrust it for an entirely different reason. I once wanted to download a paper, and could only do it if I signed up. I signed up by logging on with my facebook account... Well, academia.edu took my profile information, and, without me knowing it, created an academia profile. With my picture, publications it could find via search engines, and a list of interests that were half right and half ridiculous. I'm a neuroscientist; it listed me as being interested in marketing, among other things. I only discovered this profile about a month later.

Apart from it being entirely unprofessional, I simply do not trust information that is on there, as I have first-hand experience that information on me was wrong.

Having an Academia.edu account (which I'm pretty sure I've had for around 2+ years), I can say that I am not real satisfied with the service. My particular field in social science has a relatively small online footprint, and I thought Academia.edu may be starting to have a big growth when I signed up, but it still has never really caught on with any more than a small minority of my field. This point will come up again in my responses, in that if Academia.edu has more infiltration into your field it could work slightly better.

So for 1, you can peruse the site and see for yourself. Basically a profile page where you can post your CV and other links if you wish, and then upload pre-prints. You can then assign tags of interest to follow for yourself, and follow specific colleagues. Using these links, it has a front page feature, similar to Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn, but the page is filled with pre-prints of people in your network and of the tags you follow.

The upload of papers is pretty wide open (there is no quality checking), and I've seen people starting to upload syllabi as well. I've stopped uploading pre-prints because of the crazy terms of service. Unfortunately, some anecdotal evidence of my papers suggests that their promotion of papers across the network (and with search indexing) is less rigorous when you don't upload an actual pre-print. Also I've always been a bit annoyed I can't just upload a bibtext snippet to fill in the meta-data.

For 2.1 and 2.2 it would work better if there were more uptake in the field. IMO conferences work pretty well for 2.1, and Google scholar works pretty well for 2.2.

2.3, post publication peer-review is no, it does not offer comments on particular papers. 2.4, managing a bibliography among a research group is no as well (see these responses to that question). It does offer a bare-bones email type system, but that is obviously no better than email to begin with.

3, I don't know specifically. When you have co-authors you do need to verify them.

4, I don't know - it is similar in functionality to LinkedIn and Facebook, so I presume the same type of business model just a different user base.

In retrospect I would not have signed up for an account. I'm happy with posting pre-prints to SSRN, and there are similar sites for a variety of different disciplines. If you want a barebones free personal online website it kind of works for that, but I enjoy having a free wordpress blog that does the job and I have much more control over the content and format of the site. Google scholar works quite well for finding content. Strong networking ties in my experience happen more in conferences and just naturally being in the field over a time period. "Friending" someone on Academia.edu is a bit superficial.

No. Academia.edu is academic spam.

The unsolicited emails I received from academia.edu had absolutely nothing to do with my research. They sent me a weekly digest of utterly random papers that I did not recognize, but they seemed to think might interest me. They also sometimes asked me to confirm a coauthor. This was either someone I didn't know, or someone I did know who made the mistake of using their "service" and thereby unwittingly spammed their coauthors. They do host content, which I guess is a legitimate service, but they generally insist that people sign in to view it, which makes it more annoying than useful.

I clicked the unsubscribe link in their emails and it asked me to create an account in order to unsubscribe! (Is that even legal?) To me, this is a clear sign that they are not operating in good faith. I think they are spammers, plain and simple.

By the way, if you want to unsubscribe from their communications, email the CEO at [email protected] as well as [email protected]. That worked for me.