This graph depicts activity on my Academia.edu page from March 2, 2022 to April 1, 2022 (click on the graph to enlarge it):
What happened at the end of March?
The upper green line depicts the number of views for individual documents while the lower black line depicts the number of document downloads. We see a dramatic increase in the number of views. Here’s the number of views at the end-of-day for March 25 through April 1.
March 25: 34
March 26: 61
March 27: 104
March 28: 875
March 29: 388
March 30: 184
March 31: 249
April 1: 44 (7:39 AM)
The total for March 28, 875, is by far the largest number of views I’ve had in a single day. The total for the previous day, 104, may well be the largest number of views up to that date (I started posting at Academia a decade or so ago). The number of views per day is generally between 10 and 50. An older post on activity at my Academia page gives a sense of my normal action at the site: How am I doing at regulating my action at Academia.edu?
Why the sudden increase? I don’t know. However, once I noticed that the increase from the 27th continued on the 28th, I began tweeting links to various papers. I noticed that almost immediately after I’d posted a tweet to my Twitter feed, views of that document would show up on my Academia page. Obviously someone – bots perhaps? – was watching my tweet stream. I note that the increased activity seems to be coming from a number of different geographic locations.
I must have tweeted 20 or 30 or more links on the 28th. The total for the 29th, 388, was down considerably, but still well above the usual. I did some tweeting of papers on the 29th, but not so many. The totals for the 30th and 31st are still well above usual, with some tweeting of papers on my part. Note that I captured the graph at 7:39 AM on April 1, when there were 44 views. I don’t know what the number will be for the end of the day.
