Academia.edu has been called “Facebook for academics,” and the analogy is fitting: Academia.edu mimics core social-media conventions, down to follower counts, curated profiles with pics, and a scrollable “News Feed” bulletin of followers’ uploads. But its reliance on user-facing metrics exceeds anything you’ll find on mainstream social media. It comes with a dedicated “Analytics” page resembling a gaming leaderboard or a corporation’s annual report. The charts and graphs encourage incessant monitoring, which dovetails with university policies that seek to measure quantifiable “impact.” The result? Scholars are internalizing an analytics mind-set.