6. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a computer program product comprised of a series of instructions executable on a computer, the computer program product performing a process for gathering data related to a plurality of academic users and a process for determining a reputation ranking an academic user, the computer program product implementing the steps of: for each user, determining whether the user is an academic user or a non-academic user, creating an academic user profile for each of the academic users from attribute information gathered from a user profile prompt displayed on user computers associated with the academic users, allowing the academic users to upload academic articles, enabling the academic user profiles to be viewed by both other academic users and non-academic users, allowing each of the academic users to comment on the academic articles uploaded by other academic users while restricting the non-academic users from commenting on the articles, enabling email communications between the academic users while restricting the non-academic users from emailing the academic users, enabling the academic user profile of each academic user to be selected for ranking by other academic users and enabling the other academic users to provide rank selections for the academic user profile according to at least one of research quality, credentials, research articles, and user activity of the academic user associated with the academic user profile, assigning each of the rank selections a ranking weight based upon at least one of academic credentials or publication volume of the respective selecting academic user and multiplying the rank selection by the ranking weight to create a weighted rank selection, and determining reputation rankings for the academic user profiles from the weighted rank selections.
6. A non-transitory computer-readable medium storing a computer program product comprised of a series of instructions executable on a computer, the computer program product performing a process for gathering data related to a plurality of academic users and a process for determining a reputation ranking an academic user, the computer program product implementing the steps of: for each user, determining whether the user is an academic user or a non-academic user, creating an academic user profile for each of the academic users from attribute information gathered from a user profile prompt displayed on user computers associated with the academic users, allowing the academic users to upload academic articles, enabling the academic user profiles to be viewed by both other academic users and non-academic users, allowing each of the academic users to comment on the academic articles uploaded by other academic users while restricting the non-academic users from commenting on the articles, enabling email communications between the academic users while restricting the non-academic users from emailing the academic users, enabling the academic user profile of each academic user to be selected for ranking by other academic users and enabling the other academic users to provide rank selections for the academic user profile according to at least one of research quality, credentials, research articles, and user activity of the academic user associated with the academic user profile, assigning each of the rank selections a ranking weight based upon at least one of academic credentials or publication volume of the respective selecting academic user and multiplying the rank selection by the ranking weight to create a weighted rank selection, and determining reputation rankings for the academic user profiles from the weighted rank selections. 8. The computer program product of claim 6 , further including instructions for creating a user profile search prompt, the user profile search prompt being accessible to academic users and non-academic users, wherein non-academic users are restricted from creating user profiles.