Identity And Scholarship: An Experiment In The Marketing Of Research In The Age Of Social Media
As social media explodes across the internet, every possible type of content is available, and it seems that every outlet has its own unique sales pitch. Academia.com for example, has sent me dozens of emails about mentions of my name, “Keith Walsh,” in academic journals.
I’m not here to bash academia.com — in fact, I have found several informative and useful pieces there — from essays titled “Marx’s Theory Of Social Alienation And The Capability Approach” to “Kierkegaard and Romanticism.” The writing seems to be top notch, though I’m only a Bachelor of Arts, and perhaps someone of a higher degree could tear these essays apart. All in all, there are 23 million papers, an impressive quantity of data.
In the past couple years or so, Academia has tried a new marketing approach: Though I have their free account, I’ve received emails telling me that my name has appeared in publications they have curated. I’m quite intrigued actually: though I publish journalism blogs using my name, it’s really doubtful that these academic publications containing writing referencing my works, or even more unlikely, that they are writing about me. There must be someone else, or several someones, with the same name, publishing in the academic sphere.
Still, after one particular email come on, I could no longer resist. I had written about rock music in the small Eastern European country, Slovenia. And now it seems someone named Keith Walsh is mentioned in an article by a faculty member at a university in the capital of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The come on was quite plain, in an email from Academia.com: “Keith Walsh, Someone in Ljubljana, Slovenia, mentioned you.”
That was almost two hard to resist. I thought about it for a while, and finally clicked through. Apparently, 688 papers mention the name Keith Walsh. After thinking about this for a while, and clicking through the offers of an upgraded membership and the price of either $9.99 a month (or $8.25 a month for an annual subscription) I decided, I would go for it, if only in the interest of research. I assure my readers that vanity has nothing to do with my decision.
So, as it turns out, I spent $9.99 to discover that someone named K. Walsh is doing some apparently impressive work in the area of proteins and hormones, related to cell activity, cardiac function, adipose tissue, and other features of bodily function. Another person, also named K. Walsh, is working on issues of border trade in India and other East Asian countries. There are many articles involving research on poor laboratory mice, involving a distinction between brown fat and white fat in lab mice, topics I’ve never considered before.
Wait a second — after a closer look at some of these articles, it turns out the fuzzy logic of the Academia.com article collators aren’t as specific as advertised. In fact, there is someone named “Kenneth Walsh” (cited in the article summary as “K. Walsh”) doing some of this research. Not the same thing at all. There’s even a Katrina Walsh cited as a collaborator in an article on gene expression in dental plaque! Each article that is featured under a tag “All Mentions” has two buttons under it: “This Is Me,” and another, “This Is Not Me.” A comment on the efficacy of the programming behind this, in which Katrina Walsh, or Kenneth Walsh, could be mistaken for Keith Walsh, is really unnecessary. Perhaps Academia.com could pay me to click on each one of these 688 buttons, as I would be doing their work for them.
The topics covered in the search on Keith Walsh are impressive in scope and diversity: there’s research on mitochondrial DNA in mice, work on heart function in humans, work on low back pain. Another researcher with this identity is doing work on the quality of elder care, with dozens of articles cited. Yet another is doing work on the genetics of hair quality and coat variation across dog breeds, with also dozens of articles, and another couple of articles on the non-invasive assessment of fruit quality in pineapples and mangos. I couldn’t make this stuff up if you paid me.
I scrolled through all 688 “mentions,” which were not mentions of me, only a fraction, maybe three percent, bearing work by my exact namesake. It would have been impossible for me to click on every article to find out how many had an exact match. And this seems to be the same challenge the programmers working for Academia.com are having. As they currently function, the search engines that collate the results on the site can’t go deeper than an initialed reference cited in a paper’s abstract, presumably because the full articles with the complete name are buried deeper in the web, outside of the purview of practicality.
One uplifting factoid: the article in which the cited person is actually my namesake is about Skateboarding Culture In Ireland, something I’m totally stoked by. And another Keith Walsh is apparently doing great work on economic theory in Ireland, and again, I’m all for that. I’d like to make it clear — I’m not anti-Academia.com, on the contrary. After this experiment, I discovered a very useful and comprehensive site for anyone seeking scientific articles on virtually any topic.
Intriguing as this all is, I never did find the hoped for gem, the article I had hoped was by someone in an humanities or social science department in Slovenia, about my journalism work covering rock music from there. Perhaps, if I keep on writing, there is still time for this to happen. I certainly hope so.
