Tips for indexing with Google Scholar
There is no need to register your site for it to be indexed. The Google Scholar crawler will
automatically find the site. The standard OJS URL structure has worked well for a long time. Avoid customizing URLs, which makes it more difficult to identify a journal site, and as a result, takes longer to index.
For indexing, Google Scholar needs URLs for all articles and bibliographic information in the form of machine-readable metadata tags (“metatags”). You can find more information about metatags in the Google Scholar inclusion guidelines:
https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html#indexing
In OJS you can view metatags in the source code from the article landing page by right-clicking or keyboard command to ‘View Page Source,’ depending on your browser, and search HTML source for “citation_’ to view metatags. Metatags should match the published PDF: for example, title, author, and publication dates match, and bibliographic metatags written in (only) language/script of the published full-text article. Don’t duplicate metatag information in multiple languages and scripts.
Common mistakes include inconsistent “first name last name” or “last name, first name” format, incomplete author names, and errors in spelling and capitalization. List complete author names in citation_author tags as they are written in the published PDF, in the same order as the author order of the published PDF. Use either “last name, first name” or “first name last name” the format in metatags.
If metatags are no longer included after the OJS upgrade, which was a known issue for journals upgrading from OJS 2.x to OJS 3.0.1, 3.0.2, 3.1.0, and 3.1.1., when the Google Scholar plugin was not automatically enabled, then –
Test: view the source code for a few articles in each journal that upgraded. If there is no citation_title tag, your site is affected.
Fix: re-enable “Google Scholar Indexing Plugin” manually for individual journals via admin dashboard for OJS instances with a small number of journals. And upgrade to OJS 3.1.2. Use an SQL command for large OJS instances with many journals:
https://github.com/pkp/ojs/blob/stable-3_1_2/dbscripts/xml/upgrade/3.1.2_update.xml#L41..L42
