Academics earn tenure on research and lose it on Twitter. The Den balances both — citation tracking weighted by venue tier, CFP pipeline, press quote opportunities, public-engagement signals. Drafts never claim prior work without a citation handle.
Free plan available. Switch Dens anytime.
You are halfway through the tenure clock. You have published two peer-reviewed papers and have three under review. Your committee will look at citation impact, public engagement, conference visibility, and grant funding. The Den runs the public-engagement-and-visibility motion in twenty minutes a day, leaving you the hours that actually matter for the research itself.
The Academic Authority Score weighs venue-tier-corrected citations heaviest, then conference-keynote visibility, then aligned-press coverage, then peer-recognition signals. Generic social-media metrics are deweighted entirely. Your tenure committee does not care about your follower count; the Den does not pretend they do.
You completed your doctorate two to four years ago. You are publishing actively, applying for tenure-track positions, and increasingly fielding press requests in your subfield. The Den helps you build the public-facing layer of your scholarly identity in parallel with the research itself. Press quote opportunities tied to your research, conference CFP visibility, public-engagement signals — all calibrated to your subfield specifically.
The research signals widget surfaces scholars whose recent work overlaps yours, drafted introductions ready, so collaboration paths open during the postdoc rather than after the first job-market cycle.
You are an established academic who also writes for a general audience — books, op-eds, podcasts, public lectures. Your career depends on both: research authority earns the right to public voice, and public visibility supports the research enterprise (grants, students, peer recognition). The Den runs both motions in parallel.
The press quote opportunities widget surfaces national-press requests where your subfield voice fits the angle, drafted with citation handles that match your published work. The public-engagement signals widget tracks where your books, op-eds, and lectures get cited and amplified.
You earned tenure five to seven years ago. Your full-professor case will look different from the tenure case — broader impact, more service, more public-facing work, peer leadership in the field. The Den's weighting at the associate-to-full transition shifts toward keynote conference invites, journal editorship signals, and large-grant principal-investigator visibility.
You are not on the tenure track but your career depends on grants and on a research program. The Den runs the visibility motion that makes grants come faster — research signals, conference CFP pipeline, press quote opportunities, public-engagement coverage. Your career arc looks different from the tenure arc; the Den's calibration adjusts.
Four ALPS widgets refresh daily. Drafts require citation handles before they leave. Nothing is auto-sent.
Monday morning between teaching prep and office hours you open the Den. The Academic Authority Score moved up two points across the week — a citation of your 2024 paper landed in a top journal in your subfield. Three press signals sit at the top. One is a national outlet writing about a topic your dissertation chapter covered. The drafted reply offers a specific finding from chapter four with the DOI included. The drafter checks for a citation handle before allowing the message to be queued. You read, send. Nine minutes.
Tuesday a CFP closes Friday. The conference is the major one in your subfield, the recent keynote was a senior scholar whose work cites yours, and the conference's stated theme matches a paper you have under review. The drafted proposal is three paragraphs, references the prior keynote, and includes the under-review paper's central finding (with the preprint arXiv ID for verification). You forward to your co-author for review, send Thursday.
Wednesday the research signals widget surfaces a scholar whose recent paper opens collaboration overlap with your work. The drafted introduction references both papers specifically — yours by DOI, hers by journal-and-volume — and proposes a specific methodological overlap. You send. By Friday she replies with interest in a co-authored response paper.
Thursday is research day. You skip the Den.
Friday morning the defensive watch widget shows a public-engagement post you wrote three months ago has been cited in a popular Substack newsletter. The drafted follow-up is a thank-you-plus-pointer post that links to the new paper your earlier piece foreshadowed. You publish. Two hundred new email signups to your research newsletter by the following Monday.
Across the week you spent under an hour in the Den. You sent one press reply with citation, one conference proposal with citation, one collaboration introduction with citations on both sides, and one public-engagement follow-up. The citation-handle requirement caught and corrected one unsourced reference before it left.
Public-engagement posts that overstate findings or claim work without citing it can sink an academic's reputation faster than any other category of mistake. The drafter's citation-handle requirement makes overstatement structurally hard. The drafter rejects messages that cite prior work generically.
Academics chase prestige conferences whose audiences do not actually move their citation graph or job-market position. The CFP widget scores audience-citation fit, not raw conference prestige. The right subfield conference with two hundred attendees beats a generalist conference with two thousand if the citation graph runs through the smaller venue.
Most research collaborations come from triangulated overlap rather than serendipitous meetings. Academics who wait for serendipity miss the collaborations that would have moved their work fastest. The research signals widget triangulates the overlap and surfaces the introduction at the moment it would land best.
Tenure dossiers get assembled in a panic six weeks before submission. Most academics scramble to reconstruct citation impact, press coverage, conference visibility, and public engagement from memory and partial records. The defensive-watch widget tags tenure-relevant coverage as it lands, building the dossier across years rather than weeks.
Google Scholar and Semantic Scholar are excellent for tracking your own citations and finding related work. They are static lookup tools. The Den runs the demand-side authority motion alongside — press quote opportunities tied to your research, conference CFP pipeline, public-engagement signals, defensive watch. Most academics use Scholar for tracking and the Den for daily authority and engagement work.
ResearchGate and Academia.edu are paper-hosting platforms with social features attached. They are useful for paper distribution and citation tracking. The Den runs the engagement-and-visibility layer that those platforms do not — drafted press replies, drafted conference proposals, drafted collaboration introductions. Most academics use ResearchGate for hosting and the Den for engagement.
Most universities offer some level of communications support — a media-relations office that handles press calls. That support is structural and slow, and it is calibrated for institutional rather than individual visibility. The Den is daily, individual, and calibrated to the academic's specific career arc. Most academics use the university comms office for major moments and the Den for everything else.
The Pro tier covers a single academic running their own daily rhythm. Most academic users do not need the Agency tier — universities and departments rarely buy collective subscriptions for individual scholars.
The free plan gives you the Den read-only with a daily limit on drafted-action generation, which is enough to feel the cadence before committing.
An assistant professor in computational linguistics in year three of the tenure track opens the Academic Den. Her Academic Authority Score sits at thirty-nine. She has three published papers, one preprint, and one paper under review. The Den surfaces two national outlets whose recent stories touched language-model evaluation, queued drafted replies with citation handles to her published work. By month three she had been quoted in two national outlets on her subfield. The CFP widget surfaced a major venue's open call; her proposal referenced her under-review paper and was accepted. The research signals widget triangulated three scholars whose recent papers overlapped her methodology; one collaboration introduction converted into a co-authored paper that landed in a top venue by month nine. By tenure-dossier time at year five, her score sat at sixty-eight, and the dossier was effectively pre-built across the prior two years rather than reconstructed in the final six weeks. She earned tenure. The Den did not write her papers, run her experiments, or earn her tenure — she did. The Den ran the public-engagement-and-visibility layer in twenty minutes a day instead of the hours of evenings she had been giving up to keep up.
Sign up free. Pick the Academic Den as your first Den. Connect your faculty page, your ORCID, your subfield keywords, and the journals and conferences your peer scholars read. The Den hydrates with subfield-aware data in about an hour and starts surfacing drafted moves the next morning. The citation-handle requirement is on by default and cannot be turned off.
You can switch Dens any time. Pro tier supports two active Dens at once — many academics also run the Author Den or Speaker Den alongside, especially if they are writing books for a general audience.
Top journal in your subfield counts heaviest, mid-tier journals next, well-cited preprints next, and blog or trade-press citations weigh least. The Den reflects how academic communities actually evaluate impact.
Every drafted message that references prior research must include a DOI, arXiv ID, journal-and-volume, or stable URL. The drafter rejects messages that cite prior work generically.
Tenure-track faculty in years two through six, postdocs with public-facing work, and public intellectuals.
The research signals widget surfaces scholars whose recent work overlaps yours via co-citation patterns, conference co-attendance, shared methodology, and adjacent topic clusters.
Scholar is a static lookup tool. The Den runs the demand-side authority motion alongside — press, CFPs, collaboration intros, public engagement.
Indirectly. The Den surfaces NSF/NIH program-officer transitions and RFP cycles aligned to your research. It does not draft proposals.
The Den does not write papers, does not auto-claim authorship, and does not allow citations without handles.