in the cloud

The past five years have seen a proliferation of sites like Academia.edu, which, with 1.2 million registered users, is one of the heavyweights in the field.

The free sites, which also include Mendeley.com, ResearchGate.net, Zotero.org, and a number of discipline-specific platforms, typically offer users a way to organize their research, create personal profiles, and search for people with similar scholarly interests.

While the number of faculty-networking sites is growing, and their registered-user figures soar into the millions, their impact on higher education is less clear.