A reason to post your papers on your website

When you post your papers online, people download them. And they presumably read them (or at least they probably look at them). I post my papers in three places; this is an experiment to see which seems to work the best. Those locations have a priority in terms of how many papers are posted, and I think this translates into a hierarchy of how much these three locations are used (but I only have data on locations # 2 and 3).

Location 1 is the publications list on my own website. This has been around the longest and it has all of my recent papers and many of my older ones. I don't have any data on downloads or views, however.

Location 2 is my page on the Selected Works site. I have talked about Selected Works there. And I have remarked on the fact that my Spanish-language papers are downloaded (from that site) more more frequently than my English-language papers here. Below I show my current download data for Selected Works. These data provide the "reason to post your papers" from the title of this entry (and they confirm my earlier post about Spanish language papers).

Location 3 is Academia.edu. This is an academic networking site. There doesn't seem to be much social networking going on (which is good, in my mind), but it does let you find other scholars with similar interests. More to the point here, you can post your papers, a CV, etc. This may be the easiest place for grad students to make a simple web page, post some papers and list your research interests. One advantage of this site is that they are well positioned in Google searches. These data are tracked under "keywords." For example, in the past year or so, over 600 Google searches have found my papers on Academia.edu, and you can look at the actual search terms people have used. I haven't been the target of many searches looking for "brilliant scholarship on the Aztecs" or "ground-breaking ideas on ancient cities;" oh well. In fact, the vast majority are looking for information on V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution, and after I posted my recent paper on this topic I started getting lots of Google hits (there must be many college assignments on the Urban Revolution this year).

Below are my download data from Selected Works, current as of today:

Paper	Downloads			Date Posted
La fundación de los capitales de las ciudades-estado aztecas: la recreación ideológico de Tollan	601			8/12/08
El imperio de la triple alianza (Tenochtitlan, Texcoco y Tlacopan) en el siglo XXI	502			8/4/08
V. Gordon Childe and the Urban Revolution: An Historical Perspective on a Revolution in Urban Studies	345			6/19/09
Las ofrendas de Calixtlahuaca	303			7/9/08
Foreward: Aztec Figurine Studies	202			8/4/08
La cerámica posclásica de Morelos	170			7/8/08
The Earliest Cities	168			7/9/08
La fundación de las ciudades en el mundo antiguo: revisión de conceptos	167			8/4/08
The Aztec Empire	151			2/17/09
Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms?	123			7/9/08
City Planning: Aztec City Planning	119			7/8/08
Sources of Imported Obsidian at Postclassic Sites in the Yautepec Valley, Morelos: A Characterization Study Using XRF and INAA	119			7/8/08
A Quarter-Century of Aztec Studies	110			7/9/08
Aztec Feasts, Rituals, and Markets: Political Uses of Ceramic Vessels in a Commercial Economy	106			8/28/08
How do Archaeologists Compare Early States? Book Review Essay on Bruce Trigger and Adam T. Smith	96			7/8/08
The Archaeological Study of Empires and Imperialism in Prehispanic Central Mexico	95			7/9/08
Can we Read Cosmology from Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff	74			8/20/08
Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning	70			7/8/08
Domestic Ritual at Aztec Provincial Sites in Morelos	66			8/20/08
Los hogares de Morelos en el sistema mundial mesoamericano posclásico	65			8/28/08
Tula and Chichén Itzá: Are We Asking the Right Questions?	63			7/8/08
Comercio postclásico en la cerámica decorada: Malinalco, Toluca, Guerrero y Morelos	58			7/9/08
Review of: Ancient Middle Niger: Urbanism and the Self-Organizing Landscape , by Roderick J. McIntosh	57			8/4/08
City Size in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica	55			7/9/08
Editorial: Just How Comparative is Comparative Urban Geography?: A Perspective from Archaeology	53			2/5/09
Life in the Provinces of the Aztec Empires	53			8/12/08
New World States and Empires: Economic and Social Organization	52			7/9/08
The Aztec Empire and the Mesoamerican World system	50			8/20/08
The Aztec World of Gary Jennings	50			8/28/08
The Archaeology of Ancient State Economies	42			7/8/08
New World States and Empires: Politics, Religion, and Urbanism	33			7/9/08
Aztec City-States	32			8/20/08
Postclassic Ceramics from the Toluca Valley in U.S. Museums: The Bauer and Blake Collections	24			8/28/08
Review of: The Tenochca Empire of Central Mexico, by Pedro Carrasco	22			8/4/08
Review of The Ancient City, edited by Joyce Marcus and Jeremy Sabloff	19			11/20/09
Xoo-Phase Ceramics from Oaxaca Found at Calixtlahuaca in Central Mexico	18			8/12/08
Economies and Polities in Aztec-period Morelos: Ethnohistoric Introduction	13			7/9/09

So, if you want people to see, read, and cite your papers, then you should self-archive someplace. This does not necessarily translate directly into citations; my citation data on Google Scholar or in the Thomson/ISI database are quite a bit lower, typically by an order or magnitude, than these figures. Nevertheless, there is probably in indirect relationship; more downloads probably lead to more citations in the long run (there are probably data on this somewhere).
\