Post your articles to Academia.edu as soon as they’re published, get more citations….

Based on a sample size of 34,940 papers, we find that a paper in a median impact factor journal uploaded to Academia.edu receives 41% more citations after one year than a similar article not available online, 50% more citations after three years, and 73% after five years. We also found that articles also posted to Academia.edu had 64% more citations than articles only posted to other online venues, such as personal and departmental homepages, after five years.” [the conclusion expands this “other” element, it includes: “journal site, or any other online hosting venue”]

The studied papers were uploaded at “the same time they’re published”. Excluded from the study were… “articles uploaded to Academia.edu after they were published”.

Amazingly, the authors also note that…

To our knowledge there has been no research on what features of open access repositories or databases make articles easier to discover”

All that public money spent on repositories around the world, and not one librarian has felt the need to test for such public discoverability vectors? Seriously?