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What is Google Scholar exactly and how does it work?
Like Google, Google Scholar is a crawler-based search engine. Crawler-based search engines are able to index machine-readable metadata or full-text files automatically using “web crawlers,” also known as “spiders” or “bots,” which are automated internet programs that systematically “crawl” websites to identify and ingest new content.
Google Scholar has access to all of the crawlable scholarly content published on the web, with the ability to index entire publisher and journal websites as well as the ability to use the citations in the articles it has indexed to find other related content. Google Scholar includes content across academic disciplines, from all countries, and in all languages.
Google Scholar is an “invitation based search engine.” This means that “only articles from trusted sources and articles that are ‘invited’ (cited) by articles already indexed are included in the database.” On its website Google Scholar states, “we work with publishers of scholarly information to index peer-reviewed papers, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all disciplines of research and make them searchable on Google and Google Scholar.”
Why should I index my journals in Google Scholar?
Google Scholar indexing can greatly expand the reach of your journal articles and improve the chances of your articles being read, shared, and cited online. A primary benefit of Google Scholar is that, unlike other databases, its search functionality focuses on individual articles, not entire journals. So having your articles indexed in Google Scholar can help more scholars discover the journals you publish when those articles show up in keyword and key phrase searches. Also, it helps resurface old articles from the journals you publish — Google Scholar takes citations into account and shows more frequently cited works earlier in search results
How do I index a journal?
In order for your journals to be considered for inclusion in Google Scholar, the content on your website must first meet two basic criteria:
From there your journal website and articles will have to meet certain technical specifications, which we outline below.
For open access journals the importance of Google Scholar indexing is even greater. If you want your content to be accessible, making it freely available isn’t enough — you have to be sure that anyone can find your journal articles on the web and that they aren’t only available to scholars with access to subscription-based academic abstracting and indexing databases or prior knowledge of your journals (i.e. scholar knows to search for your specific journal website). Google Scholar makes it possible for anyone to freely search for and find relevant scholarly content on the web from anywhere in the world.
As noted, Google Scholar doesn’t just index all of the content it can access on the web. Rather, it seeks to index content from what it deems to be “trusted” publication websites. If other articles from trusted websites have cited a journal article Google Scholar will know to index it, but any content that is not published on a “trusted” website and that has not been cited by an article already included in Google Scholar will not be indexed right away.
In order for Google Scholar to deem a journal website trustworthy, it must follow all of Google Scholar’s technical guidelines.
What steps can I take to get my journals indexed by Google Scholar?
Google Scholar has thorough Inclusion Guidelines for Webmasters that detail how to get your articles added to the index.
Some steps you may need to take include:
Google Scholar’s indexing guidelines can get pretty technical. If your journal or journals are currently hosted 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 work with available internal IT resources to make any necessary updates or hire a web developer.
If you don’t want to deal with the technical aspects of getting your journal articles indexed in Google Scholar, you may want to consider moving your journal to a website hosted on a journal publishing platform that can take care of Google Scholar indexing for you, such as the Open Journal Systems (OJS). Some journal databases, such as Scielo or JSTOR, are also indexed by Google Scholar. So if you publish via a Google Scholar indexed aggregator or database, or if you regularly upload articles to one, you may also be able to have articles added to Google Scholar through it. You’ll want to check with any journal hosting platform or aggregator to make sure that they support indexing in Google Scholar.
After preparing the journal’s website to meet the Google Scholar standards, editors and publishers also should contact Google Scholar to request the inclusion: https://support.google.com/scholar/troubleshooter/23941?hl=en
Google Scholar indexing is sure to expand the accessibility and reach of the articles you publish. We hope these tips are helpful!
Source: This is an adapted excerpt of a post written by Danielle Padula in 2016 (last updated in 2019) and published in https://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/why-having-your-journal-indexed-in-google-scholar-matters-more-than-ever-and-steps-to-get-started/. It was adapted by Kler Godoy (ANPAD).