Written for the future benefit of academia.edu's users, if the front-end developers of Academia Inc address these unsolicited suggestions. Updated- 8 May, 2026
Dear
Dr Richard Price and whom else it may concern, below are some issues that academia.edu might consider addressing to provide a better service for subscribers like yours truly.
1. A route to see the citations flagged in Academia Manuscript alerts
It can be exciting to learn that one's work is cited in an email alert (see Figure 1).
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| Figure 1. Academia.edu Mentions - claim your citation email alert (screenshot in author's Mail, 2026) |
In stark contrast, it's underwhelming that the 'View your Citation' button's link simply takes one to one's personal academia.edu stream, versus that specific mention*. This would not be so irritating, if your subscriber could then follow a route under Mentions to spot the specific, flagged citation. Or at least have the option to view citations for the mentioned article, rather than scrolling through many that one has already reviewed. Without efficient navigation routes for reviewing a specific article's citation, such emails can be interpreted as clickbait targeted to drive visits. It's certainly not an alert that is easy for users to act on with many unverified citations.
* I appreciate that the non-specific link may be caused by Mimecast's security checks in my university email address. This creates a long link, e.g. https://eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/url=https%3A%2F%2Furl.za.m.mimecastprotect.com%2Fs%2FyPrKCDREy2sANNPXuWfrUjI5xu%3Fdomain%3Dacademia.edu&data=05%7C02%7Cusername%40cput.ac.za%7Cbb1bb20f47b74b5fc07d08dea9ab2ffe%7C90bb22dba73a4971b7d67ca3ef90cf06%7C0%7C0%7C639134749886270150%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=l4AQJ8IKnUYPhIT%2Bc0IxBQD1Q3fN3BbtQfbWpsqmYks%3D&reserved=0.
Given that this is likely to be happening for many academic email addresses, providing a workaround for users to locate the exact citation would be helpful to them.
2. A route to better identify one's mentions vs. those whose initial(s) and surname match
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| Figure 2. Screenshot of academia.edu identifying mentions of T Noakes (2026) |
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Being the son of a
prolific Emeritus Professor whose first initial I share, my experience is admittedly an outlier's. But while this issue may not affect many of your users, the current identifying Mentions route shown in Figure 2 will be highly inefficient for those impacted unfortunates. In my case, I would appreciate having the option to preclude all outputs that originated before my publication record began from 2011. Hopefully, this would substantially cut down the 6,000 odd mentions I still "need" to review! Then, for those that remain, it would be good to have a mass selection option for 'This is not me', rather than slowly doing them one-by-one to get closer to my
Google Scholar citations profile that shows just over 200. As you can appreciate, that's a lot of 'This is not me' still to identify 😅...
3. Add a 'This is fake!' button to report hallucinated references and fake outputs
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| Figure 3. Screenshot of the 'This is me' and 'This is not me' button choices on academia.edu (2026) |
Naddaf and Quill (
2026) describe a sharp increase in references that cannot be traced to actual academic publications. This Nature news team and Grounded AI investigation spotlights how researchers' increasing use of AI has resulted in tens of thousands of 2025 publications that contain "hallucinated references". To prevent researchers inadvertently mis-identifying such references as their own, academia.edu could provide an additional option to flag 'This is a fake reference' to remove it from users' consideration. On a related note, there seems also a need to "Report a fake paper", too. So, perhaps a 'Report fake' button that gives subscribers an option to define what's fake would be best.
4. Consolidate to reduce Academia.edu's email overload
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| Figure 4. Screenshot of Academia.edu emails, 16 - 25 April (2026) |
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| Figure 5. Screenshot of Academia.edu emails, 2 - 14 April (2026) |
Academia.edu provides an extensive range of notification options to select from under one's
Account > Email Notifications. Despite disabling many options, I receive almost daily email correspondence. For example, Figures 4 and 5 consolidate all the email alerts received for April. Do consider offering the option to consolidate alerts for; General Announcements, Your Network, Analytics, Discussions, Your Papers and Other Emails all into a weekly update. This alternative is preferable to unsubscribing from communications that may be helpful, but seem far too frequent.
5. Support easy reporting of article duplicates
Since each academia.edu author can upload a co-authored paper, it is relatively easy for multiple records to be created for the same manuscript.
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| Figure 6. Screenshot of four duplicate records for the same article by one author under Academia.edu's My Mentions |
These doppelgängers become very obvious when Academia.edu's My Mentions is organised by 'Recency'. Multiple records for same article are then shown underneath each other (as per Figure 6's example for a sole-authored paper that strangely has four records), so are hard to miss. It would be helpful if there was a tickbox to select such records and suggest that they be merged.
6. Flag co-authors names that are missing-in-action
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| Figure 7. Screenshot of academia.edu article edit showing all four co-authors being credited (2026) ... |
It is possible for co-authors to be added in a research output's edited record, but not be shown in that output's listing. An example of this is shown in Figure 7, where four article co-authors are credited, but only two are shown under the article's
listing (see Figure 8).
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Figure 8. ... but only two authors are shown under the title for the same Academia.edu record (2026)
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There should be an option to report on academia.edu that co-authors' names are missing-in-action through not being displayed for a particular output. This may in turn assist Academia.edu in cleaning up separate records for the same research output.
7. Offer citation exports for popular referencing file formats
Please shift from offering only a 'cut-and-paste' referencing option to supporting downloadable references. It would be helpful for researchers to be able to export citations in popular referencing file formats, such as RIS (.ris), BibTeX (.bib) and EndNote XML (.xml).
Thank you in advance for your consideration, Academia.Inc.
Readers, kindly add any additional suggestions in the comments below, thanks.
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