Academia.edu is getting useful

Academia.edu is starting to be useful. I've had a page there for a year or so, posted a few papers, and done some snooping around to find people working on topics of interest to me that are outside of my own archaeological field. But in the past week, I've gotten a couple of good leads that would have taken much longer to find otherwise. First, I located someone (Jennifer Birch) whose work on Iroquois villages in Ontario is relevant to my transdisciplinary urbanism project (where one research thread is to investigate neighborhoods, or neighborhood-like spatial units, in "non-urban" settlements such as Southwest pueblos, or Iroquois villages).

Second, I got notice of a new paper by geographer Andrew Sluyter on recentism. I have talked about recentism in this blog previously, and I have a paper in press in the CAJ that deals with the topic. Here is Sluyter's paper:

Sluyter, Andrew
2010 The Geographical Review's Historical Dimensions and Recentism. The Geographical Review 100:6-11.

And here is his page on Academia.edu (where you can get this and other papers of his).

Until more people sign up for Academia.edu, I think its usefulness will remain limited. But perhaps it is reaching a tipping point now (or perhaps this is just random luck on my part). If you don't have a personal web page where you post your papers, Academia.edu is a good place to easily create such a page and get some increased exposure and citations. I thank Åsa M Larsson

for initially making this suggestion in a comment on this blog.