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Google Scholar Indexing | PKP Docs

Google Scholar, a popular scholarly indexing engine.  It crawls the web looking for scholarly publications such as articles, books, reports, theses, conference proceedings, pre-prints, among others.

Google scholar

  • Identifies scholarly content
  • Determines each item’s bibliographic metadata, and
  • Groups different online versions of an item together with this (bibliographic) metadata in search results.

Note: There is no need to register your journal with Google Scholar. Google Scholar will eventually find and automatically crawl the site.

In order to do its indexing, Google Scholar relies on two key pieces of information:

  1. Crawl all the URLs, – or essentially links, – or a sitemap.
  2. Bibliographic information from articles. This is in the form of machine-readable metadata tags (“metatags”).
    Bibliographic metatags indicate to Google Scholar the specific metadata for an article (e.g. title, author, publication date, etc.).

Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters Google Scholar inclusion guidelines

Metatags example

<meta name="citation_title" content="16th Amendment Controversy between Legislature and Judiciary: An Analysis">
<meta name="citation_author" content="Mahdee Zubuair">
<meta name="citation_date" content="2022/06/30"> 
<meta name="citation_journal_title" content="Asian Journal of Humanity, Art and Literature">
<meta name="citation_volume" content="9">
<meta name="citation_issue" content="1">
<meta name="citation_firstpage" content="9">
<meta name="citation_lastpage" content="18">
<meta name="citation_pdf_url" content="https://i-proclaim.my/journals/index.php/ajhal/article/download/635/590">

The <meta name="citation_pdf_url"/> provides a direct URL to the article galley, and tells the indexing system which file to associate with this metadata.

If you notice that your journal(s) are not appearing in Google Scholar, there may be some issues that need to be addressed, see the common OJS indexing problems and suggested fixes below.

Troubleshooting for Journal Managers and Editors

It could be due to inconsistencies between the journal’s metadata and the Galley files (PDF, HTML, XML etc).
Metadata in the Tags & Galley should match precisely.

Some common discrepancies include:

  • Incorrect publication dates listed in metatags, issue data and gallery files.
  • Mixing up multiple languages or scripts in metatags and gallery files.
  • Language of metadata (especially title and abstract) in different language than the language of the article full text
  • Author name formatting discrepancies between metadata and galley (e.g. Given Name and Family Name format and capitalization).
  • Authors listed in a different order in metatags than the author order in the gallery (PDF, HTML, XML etc)

Note that any changes will not be reflected until Google Scholar makes changes to its’ index which occurs twice yearly.

  • Check for consistency in the publication date
  • Use only one language in each metadata tag, and don’t reproduce duplicate metadata for different languages. Instead use translated version.
  • Use the full-text language in the metadata tags
  • Ensure that authors’ names are formatted consistently

Troubleshooting for Site Administrators

Google Scholar will stop indexing a journal if:

  • There are high numbers of metadata errors
  • The metatags are missing entirely
  • The HTTPS certificate is invalid or expired
  • There are frequent site downtimes
  • The OJS site has been hacked

Best practices for OJS journal indexing

  • Avoid customized URL structures
  • Set up article-level redirects
  • Improve SEO

Please contact for OJS management and support

OJS Expert