Why having your journal indexed in Google Scholar matters more than ever and steps to get started
the best place for scholars to quickly find accessible articles
relevant to their research on the web? Based on the title of this post
you likely guessed Google Scholar — and you’re right!
A 2015 survey on 101 Innovations in Scholarly Communication found that 92% of academics are on Google Scholar,
and for good reason. Google Scholar stands apart as one of the most
sophisticated research indexes on the web. As part of Google’s search
engine, Google Scholar has access to more content than its competitors’
databases, with the ability to crawl entire publisher and journal
websites to pull in new content as well as the ability to use the
citations in trusted, indexed articles to find and index new research.
However, despite the seemingly magical ability of Google to answer
any search query with countless results, the search engine can only
include content that its crawlers know to find. Journals must take steps
to ensure that their articles are being crawled by Google Scholar if
they want them to be indexed.
Are all of your journal’s articles being indexed by Google Scholar?
If you don’t know the answer, now is the time to find out and to take
steps to ensure your articles get added to the index.
Why should I get my journal indexed in Google Scholar?
Wetalked about the broad research benefits of Google Scholar, but you may
be wondering: what’s in it for your journal? A primary benefit of
Google Scholar is that unlike other databases its search functionality
focuses on individual articles, not entire journals, and today’s
scholars are typing in keywords and phrases to find the right article, rather than journal, for their research.
Getting your articles indexed on Google Scholar will:
- Give scholars an easy way to find specific articles from your
journal and gauge how relevant they are to their research based on the
article title and search snippet - Increase the impact of individual articles and your journal as a
whole because more scholars will be likely to find your content via
targeted Google searches - Help resurface old articles from your journal — Google Scholar takes
citations into account and shows more frequently cited works earlier in
a search
even greater. If you want your content to be accessible, making it
freely available isn’t enough - you have to be sure people can find it
on the web and that it isn’t only available to scholars who know to
search for your journal website or who have access to subscription
databases.
How can I tell if my journal is being indexed by Google Scholar?
Nowthat you’ve seen the many benefits of being included in Google Scholar
you’re likely wondering if all of your articles can presently be found
by the index. But, how can you tell?
You’ll need to first figure out if your journal is a part of a trusted website.
Unlike Google, Google Scholar doesn’t just index everything it can
access on the web. Rather, it seeks to index content from legitimized
research websites. While in a random search, you may find that some of
your articles are already on Google Scholar that doesn’t guarantee that
all of your content will be there. If other articles from trusted
websites cited your articles Google Scholar will know to bring them in,
but any content that has not been cited will have no links to trusted
content and will take longer to be added to the index.
Google Scholar will only deem a website trustworthy if it follows all
of the indexes’ technical guidelines and if the publisher contacts
Google Scholar to request inclusion. If you’re not sure whether your
journal is being indexed check in with your webmaster to see where you
stand.
What steps can I take to get my journal indexed by Google Scholar?
Ifyou find that your journal website is not yet setup to be indexed by
Google Scholar you’ll need to take some steps to get started.
Google Scholar has thorough Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters that detail how to update your website so that it can be recognized by the index.
Among steps you may need to take are:
- Checking your HTML and PDF file formats to make sure the text is searchable
- Configuring your website to export bibliographic data in HTML meta tags
- Making sure you have a browse interface that can be crawled by Google’s robots
your journal is currently on a standalone website that you had
custom-built or that you’re hosting via an outside provider like
WordPress, you’ll need to either pay a web developer to make these
updates or work with someone at your journal who can.
If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of getting indexed by
Google Scholar on your own, you may also want to consider moving your
journal to a website hosted on a journal management platform that can
handle Google Scholar indexing for you, like Scholastica.
Scholastica is already considered a trusted site by Google Scholar, so
all journals that publish via Scholastica journal websites are
automatically indexed with no extra work on the part of the editors.
However you decide to go about getting indexed on Google Scholar, now’s the time to start!
Why having your journal indexed in Google Scholar matters more than ever and steps to get started
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