What’s a ‘Mention’ on Academia?
Academia’s mission is to accelerate the pace of discovery. We’ve added a new premium feature called Mentions to help you demonstrate the impact of your work. You’ll receive notifications whenever others upload papers that mention your name.
Think of Mentions as lightweight citations. You might discover that a professor acknowledged you for providing input on an earlier draft, or a colleague referred to your forthcoming work, but without a full citation, or another cited your published work in a thesis, draft, foreign language, syllabus or bibliography, and so Google Scholar ignored it. Mentions helps you find these alternative forms of impact often missed by citation counts.
Starting today, you’ll also be able to make your Mentions public to anyone visiting your profile page. Just go to your mentions page and select “make public.” Once you make at least one mention public, you’ll see a link on your profile called Public Mentions.
The idea for Mentions came from conversations we had with academics about the need to demonstrate the global impact of their research. As the legal historian Paul J. du Plessis explained:
“Academia’s Mentions feature found papers citing me that Google Scholar had missed. I am adding this to my tenure case.”
Dennis Klass, who specializes in the psychology of religion, added “I have never known as much about who is using my ideas as I do now.” According to Klass, Academia’s Mentions feature found dozens of new references to his work not known to Google Scholar.
Mentions also makes it easier to connect with other researchers in the field. Claudia Boscolo, for example, a scholar of Italian Studies, said that “discovering that I was mentioned or fully cited in articles and books — which I previously had no idea they had been published — helped me to establish new relationships and connections.”
If you do not see Mentions anywhere on Academia.edu, that’s probably because we have not rolled out the feature to you yet. We expect a full site-wide rollout within a few months. If you’d like early access, let us know at premium-support@academia.edu!