Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO) algorithms

 Source: https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/10/30/academic-search-engine-optimization-aseo-algorithms/

Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO) algorithms

For scholars, it is important for them to publish their articles over the internet so that their work could be cited at some point. How academic websites optimize scholarly literature has become an important topic to learn before someone publishes his/her work. Although different search engines have different ranking algorithm, but the most basic weighting scale is as following, ranked by the importance:

• Title
• Author names
• Abstract
• (Sub)headings
• Author keywords
• Body text
• Tables and figures
• Publication name (name of journal, conference, proceedings, book, etc.)
• User keywords (Social tags)
• Social annotations
• Description
• Filename
• URI

Here is a detailed algorithm of Google Scholar scholar search engine. Firstly, an article is ranked by its relevance to the search term. The number of terms appeared in the article is crucial in determining this factor. The term in the title will be weighted more heavily than the term appeared in the abstract, the same ranking order as the chart above. By same amount of relevance, the length of title also matters, in which shorter title would be preferred over long ones. Note that the information can only be extracted from pdf format. Secondly, the citation plays a large role in an article’s ranking. Citing the articles that have higher rank will obviously return high rank to the specific article. Thirdly, the author and publication name matters. Google Scholar always prefer “big names” in their searching system. By saying “big names”, they are people who possess various topics in a certain area. Lastly, Google scholar is also known as an “invitation based search engine”, since it only index the articles coming from trusted sources. Even if they already received the pdf file of the article, they still search the web for more the same file with different versions and bundle them together in terms of indexing and ranking.

 

Source: http://www.sciplore.org/publications/2010-ASEO–preprint.pdf