Showing posts with label UX. Show all posts

Monday, 4 May 2026

A few user experience improvements for Academia.edu to consider

Written for the future benefit of academia.edu's users, if the front-end developers of Academia Inc address these unsolicited suggestions

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).

Figure 1. Academia.edu claim your citation email

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. Without these practical routes, such emails sadly read as clickbait targeted at subscribers.

* 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


Figure 2. Screenshot of academia.edu identifying mentions of T Noakes (2026)

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 a fake reference!' option

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' for removing it from consideration.

4. Consolidate to reduce Academia.edu's email overload

Figure 4. Screenshot of Academia.edu emails, 16 - 25 April (2026)

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. 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 for your consideration. Readers, kindly add any additional suggestions in the comments below, thanks.