How OJS can get indexed by Google Scholar and Microsoft Academia?

What is Google scholar indexing  #

Today who doesn’t use the Google product? 

Everyone, including even 2-year-old children, can easily use Google’s voice search feature on their Android devices with smart speech recognition. As the largest search engine, Google constantly strives to create products that seamlessly integrate with other Google products.

One of the most popular products from Google is Google Scholar, which is a vast indexing system built using the same engine as Google search. It is designed to preserve scientific articles and is widely used by organizations worldwide. It also allows to track the authors history of article publication. With Google Scholar, it’s easy to find the information you need quickly and accurately, making it an essential tool for anyone in the academic or research field.

In this post, we give an overview of how Google Scholar works and what you need to know to add your journal articles to Google Scholar. If you’re reading this, Google Scholars probably already know.

Publishers know that search engines can only index content their crawlers can find (more on crawlers below). So if you want to add a journal article to Google Scholar, you must take steps to ensure that the search engine finds it and recognizes the journal’s website as a legitimate source. 

Google Scholar (GS) is what you might think of as an academic version of Google. Instead of searching the Internet for indexed information, it searches repositories of publishers, universities, and academic websites. Nevertheless, most of the results of this search usually come from reliable scientific sources.

With so many researchers using Google Scholar, Itasas notes that journal publishers should prioritize this search engine. Admission to Google scientists can help increase the number of articles in journals such as Nature, Science, Nature Communications, and Science Advances. 

Founded in 2004, Google Scholar is a vast database of scientific literature that enables users to access information and keep up with new research findings.

Connecting users to studies and journal articles does not always mean free and unrestricted access to articles, but everyone can benefit from it because it can help those who write scientific papers to create bibliographies more easily. Google Scholar can be a great resource for those interested in higher education. 

Although Google is a general web search engine, it is only intended for school search purposes. Similarly, the scope of other literature databases is often limited to their own data. Google Scholar is similar in that its search database covers a wide range of literature, from literature for universities and online libraries to literature for the general public. 

Features of Google Scholar as stated on their official site : 

1. Search all scholarly literature from one convenient place
2. Explore related works, citations, authors, and publications
3. Locate the complete document through your library or on the web
4. Keep up with recent developments in any area of research
5. Check who’s citing your publications, create a public author profile

Why using ojs #

Open Journal Systems (OJS) is an open-source software platform that is designed to help manage and publish scholarly journals. Some reasons why one might choose to use OJS include:

1. Cost-effective: OJS is free to use and can save organizations money compared to using commercial software or outsourcing journal management and publishing.
2. Customizable: OJS is open-source, which means it can be easily customized to meet the specific needs of an organization or journal.
3. Easy to use: OJS has a user-friendly interface that makes it easy for editors, authors, and reviewers to submit, review, and publish articles.
4. Scalable: OJS can handle a large volume of submissions and can easily be adapted as a journal’s needs change.
5. Accessible: OJS allows for open-access publishing which means that published articles can be freely accessed by anyone with an internet connection, providing a greater reach and visibility for the journal and its authors.
6. Indexing: OJS can be easily integrated with many indexing services and databases, making it easier for authors to get their work discovered and cited.
7. Community Support: OJS has a large community of users and developers who provide support and share best practices, this can help organizations and journals to improve their workflow and operations.

Overall, OJS is a cost-effective, customizable, and user-friendly platform that can help manage and publish scholarly journals, making it a popular choice among organizations and journals in the academic field.

This means that more researchers are getting used to using OJS either for their publication system or for submitting any paper. 

Using OJS as a management system is very preferable for any institution. Some of the reason why this is preferable is : 

1. Always get maintenance by community support
2. Transparent and open source so in the long run the ecosystem of this product will always grow because the system not handled by one developer
3. Helpful support on the forum 
4. Many users of the journal are getting familiar with using OJS as various journal processes such as author, reviewing system, editorial process and many more. 
5. Compatible nicely with google scholar and many indexing systems. 

How to get indexed by Google Scholar  #

This section will explain two method to make your journal indexed to google scholar indexing. This part will cover manual registration and automatic registration of your OJS system. 

Before you continue to get indexed by google scholar, make sure you are using the supported system recommended by google scholar that such as : 

1. Open journal systems (OJS)
2. Dspace Repository 
3. Eprint Repository
4. And others’ publication systems. 

We divide this step into two methods : (1) Manual registration and (2) Automatic Registration. 

Manual registration #

== Updated 2 Dec 2021 – the manual registration is closed by Google, it will index the journal automatically ==

If you have a new journal and need to get indexed by google scholar you can do this step to get indexed by theme : 

1. Access this URL  Google Scholar Inclusion Registration
2. Since you are using OJS system please select the appropriate button :

3. Check all the items that you available on the Inclusion check item :

4. After you have completed all the input, then you can submit the form. 

How long google indexing will reserve your articles?
You should need to wait for the google scholar process to finish indexing your journal in between 4 to 6 weeks. Other references said that it may take one month to three months.

These manual steps are recommended only if your current journal does not get indexed by google scholar. However, if your journal has a lot of articles and frequently releases new articles the journal with many new article publications, we don’t recommend doing this manually.

Automatic Indexing  #

Google always crawls any new site and smartly knows what category of the site fits on their database. Is it a blog, newspaper, or scientific article? By using OJS as a publishing system, you can optimize how it gets automatically indexed by Google Scholar. 

To get this feature you must be sure that your current theme of OJS is compatible with google scholar tag indexing. 

To make sure that the theme is compatible with google scholar tag indexing, you can open one of your article detail pages and view-source (Ctrl + u). After you click this shortcut you will get a new additional initial parameter on your browser address bar which is view-source :

Why should we tell you this? Because some of the themes do not add the google scholar meta tag to the article page detail which will hurt the journal in the long run.
This google scholar tag in our themes such as Academic pro theme, Academic Pro Extended, Unify, Noble, and the Novelty themes, we optimized even further by automatically adding additional google tag script as recommended by google scholar here without the need to do manual theme script modification :

The result is articles that use our theme would be more compatible with google scholar indexing, as the result that it even make 2 records on google scholar :

By implementing this additional google tag code, our theme results is more compatible on google scholar indexing and automatic without any hassle to Microsoft Academia here :

Here are the steps to do it : 

1. Open your OJS backend as journal manager roles
2. On the Generic Plugins Section, Activate the google scholar indexing.

4. Save 

After you have activated the google scholar Indexing Plugin, you should wait for one to three months for Google to recrawl your journal site.

Reference :  #

1. https://partnerdash.google.com/partnerdash/d/scholarinclusions?visit_id=637192245651295019-2472102121&rd=1#p:id=new&a=100323453
2. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/inclusion.html#indexing

Muhammad Hendra

Project Manager

Hendra here, I love writing about OJS and share knowledge about OJS. My passion is about OJS, OMP platform and doing some research on creating innovated products for that platform to help publisher to improve their publication.