Brian Kelly makes a challenging argument: "I believe that adding information about one’s research publications to services such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar citations can increase the visibility of the papers to Google, as well as to users of the services, which may then lead to increased numbers of downloads, citations and take-up of the ideas described in the papers." More on this here. The problem is, this sort of pandering is exactly the sort of think SEO spammers use. And the challenge is whether we should be emulating their strategies, or undermining them. I have no doubt that sending content to the paper mills produces more hits and citations. What I question is whether this is a good thing. Because it seems to me that if we can game the number of citations we can get, it devalues citation count as an index of quality.
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