Google Scholar Indexing
All articles published to eScholarship journals are crawled by Google Scholar for indexing. Google Scholar indexes individual articles (not issues, volumes, or journals).
Google Scholar Article Ranking
Google Scholar article rankings are based on how many times and how recently an item has been cited in other scholarly literature, who the author(s) are, and where the article was published. In general, this means that Google Scholar ranks classic articles above newer ones, articles by established scholars with a long publication record over more emerging scholars, and articles in more prestigious journals above newer, less established journals.
SEO tips for Google Scholar
As a journal editor, there is not a lot you can control in terms of Google Scholar article page rankings, but you can ensure that your articles have all the information that Google Scholar needs for indexing and optimized searching. Here are a few ways:
Key terms: Because most users of Google Scholar are searching via key terms that may have several common synonyms, it can be useful to ensure that the full text of the article contains as many synonyms for important concepts as possible. Make sure that the key terms for articles are included in the title, abstract, and throughout the full text of the article.
Metadata: Google Scholar looks for a number of metadata tags in order to properly index content. The eScholarship group works to ensure that many of these are accurate, but as journal editors it’s important that you check to make sure the title, author(s), and abstract of each journal article is accurate in the metadata as you build and publish an issue. If you notice that any of your articles are improperly indexed in Google Scholar, please contact us.
Sharing: Share information about new journal issues and articles widely, from social media networks to authors’ personal websites and academic institutional pages. The more your journal’s articles are read and cited, the more highly ranked they-- and future articles-- will be in Google Scholar.
General SEO tips
The above tips hold true for optimization in most search engines. A simple web search will produce a lot of up-to-the-minute advice for SEO. We recommend this short article by the European Association of Science Editors that explains how journal editors can increase the discoverability of their journals using general SEO principles.