Keyword Round-up: April on Academia.edu

Here’s my April keyword round-up from Academia.edu, with an emphasis on “Arguably the Greatest” and imagined communities and sports fans on Wikipedia.

A bit of background: Academia.edu offers scholars analytics data, as well as the opportunity to understand the ways in which their research is being discovered. Using this data, scholars may be able to better frame their research to interested parties. It’s also claimed that this data could help an active academic seek tenure and promotion… I’ll let you know when I get there.

For most of April, I must ashamedly admit, I only had one article posted on my Academia.edu page: “Arguably the Greatest: Sports fans and communities at work on Wikipedia” – a 2009 exploration of the conflict-to-consensus process at work when fans of retired celebrity athletes go to work on framing out these athlete narratives in Wikipedia articles.**

My analytics report shows that four searches performed through Google brought searchers to my Academia.edu page. One of these searches was performed on Google.Au. The search terms were as follows:

1. arguably the greatest sport fans and communities at work on wikipedia (Google search rank: 2)
2. ‘arguably the greatest ” phrase (no Google search rank)
3. meghan arguably the greatest: sport fans and communities at work on wikipedia. sociology of sport journal 26(1): 127-154. (Google search rank: 1)
4. “imagined communities” “sports writing” (Google search rank: 1)

I found these search terms particularly interesting as two searches were directly seeking my article. How gratifying! The other two search terms suggest ways in which I could frame my research – and I am most motivated to flesh out my work in relation to imagined communities and sports writing.
Finally, the details about the Google rank of my piece were the most fascinating: this 2009 Wikipedia article is popping up as the first or second Google search result; certainly not what I expected as a referral.

In the next keyword round-up, I will discuss how adding an additional, older article about the ascription of cultural values and extension of performance for retired celebrity athletes has changed the incoming traffic for my page; affecting the relationship of profile to document views.

**Watch this space for a development and revisting of my Wikipedia research space in an upcoming piece.