Hi there…
I have made a lot of development in OJStat. In version 1.2, OJStat includes journal metrics/ratings taken from Google Scholar, Index Copernicus, CiteFactor, Moraref, and Scimago (if the journal has the IDs). All about OJStat can be found in OJStat official blog.
Update: OJStat version 1.3 is now ready
Great work!
However, the Google profile creation method that you describe¹ is only supposed to be used for researchers (actual people) and not for journals.
According to their page² a Google Scholar Profile page is meant for “authors to showcase their academic publications”.
In addition to my previous message:
Please consider removing them from the plugin and from your documentation as presenting them there send the message that they are legit.
[1] The story of fake impact factor companies and how we detected them - PMC
Just look at this misleading popup claiming users to submit to “Journal Citation report 2022.” but directing them to fill THEIR FORM (and even requesting a logo image). This is very bad.
Luciano Panepucci
Continuing on the Google Scholar issue, the proper Journal profile page is the one found by searching the journal on Google Metrics[1] and then clicking on it’s h5 index link, for example:
Which takes you to the journal page:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=pt-BR&view_op=list_hcore&venue=y8wExaNrgVQJ.2021
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=pt-BR&view_op=list_hcore&venue=H--JoiVp8x8J.2021
The journal page is identified by the venue parameter on the URL:
y8wExaNrgVQJ.2021
H--JoiVp8x8J.2021
Notice that the year is part and that you may change it and get h-factors for previous years.
This is an interesting issues among Journal publisher esp in Indonesia, which merit its quality based on metrics.
Thank you for making me aware of this. I will remove it from the plugin as well as in the documentation. Your input is so much valuable.
About Moraref, it is a journal indexing administered by the Indonesian Government (The Ministry of Religion). Technically, it does not provide a journal metric but a Grade.
This is valuable information to me and based on this input, I will revise the article. The “obstacle” that I am dealing with is that many OJS-based journals registered their GS account that way (by using a user account). Even our journal that has run for 4 years (and the articles have been cited) is not found in metrics unless we use a GS user account.
Yes, to some extent, you are correct but metric is still one of the important elements of a journal. See, either in Scopus or Scimago, it is the metric or rank that shows how “good” a journal is.
Wow @languaojs the project is growing fast in features and documentation.
Congratulations!
Let me ask about something that I was worried when it was named easyStats.
Are you saving the IP addresses of your visitors or it’s now anonymized?
Thanks a lot for your time and for sharing this jewel.
Take care,
m.
I understand. Unfortunately this work around of creating a user profile is used (and even recommended) by many individual and small university journals. However, once the journal achieves enough citations and finally appears on Google Metrics it will certainly show a different h5 index.
Thank you, Sir.
The IP addresses of the visitors are hashed/anonymized as suggested (xxx last bits). The anonymized IP addresses are saved in the database so that the app can count the unique visitors.
Here’s a PKP guide that lists common problems journals have that prevent their articles from getting indexed on Google scholar:
https://docs.pkp.sfu.ca/google-scholar/
It’s available on English and Portuguese.
I believe that conflicting information from the PDF and the page information is what I see most often.
Thank you, Sir.
I have found (and fixed) that the publication date of the articles and the publication date of the issues did not match. Thank you again.
I’m glad to have helped! 
@languaojs I believe your plugin comes to light at the perfect momment. 
Yesterday the TC published this post warning about the privacy problems related to GA and suggesting ojs-native statistics and a couple of well-known solutions (matomo & plausible):
https://pkp.sfu.ca/2022/04/21/google-analytics-privacy-practices-challenged/
I have pending to test your plugin to see what it brings with respect to the solutions that we propose from the TC but I see potential because recommended tools are generic and your plugin has room to grow in the academic context (googleScholar listings, indexes in indexers, etc).
I also think that a success factor for your plugin is that it is customizable: I mean, each journal should be able to choose which sections it wants to offer to the public and which figures are used internally.
Of course, these are just suggestions in case you intend to continue development.
Anyway, thank you very much for sharing your excellent work with the community.
Take care,
m.
Thank you for this valuable information.
I am fully aware that the privacy of visitors is something that must be maintained by web-based service providers in any form. I would also advise anyone to use the built-in OJS plugin if what is needed is the frequency of abstract views and the number of downloads. Then, why was OJStat developed in addition to the availability of Matomo, Plausible, and StatCounter? Allow me to be transparent about a few things regarding OJStat, in case any member of this forum needs that information.
OJStat uses visitor geolocation data such as IP address, country, region, city, and coordinates. This information is stored in localStorage and not Cookies (as far as I know, they are different). Geolocation data storage into localStorage is intended so that browsers do not need to send requests to geolocation service providers (Geolocation API) repeatedly every time a visitor switches from one page to another. IP addresses stored in the OJStat database cannot be accessed by any program except OJStat itself. Furthermore, the visitor’s IP address has been anonymized. OJStat may omit IP addresses from the database however OJStat will fail to count the number of unique visitors while this information is required by some journal accrediting agencies.
Information such as the browser, operating system and device used by the visitor is also recorded by OJStat. This information can even be accessed through the browser console without any additional programs. This means that this information is open information that can be accessed by anyone. The benefit of this information is that journal managers can optimize their journal web to better support dominant browsers, operating systems, and devices.
Visited pages are also recorded using title tags so that OJStat users can monitor the viewability of all pages in one table only. I believe that this will make it much easier for all of us to monitor how much attention a page is getting in a journal and what the average daily visits a journal is getting.
OJStat uses several frameworks such as Bootstrap, Jquery, ChartJS, and Leaflet to manage the appearance and interactivity of OJStat pages.
All statistical data displayed by OJStat comes from only one table which can be viewed by each user via cPanel. Meanwhile, regarding metrics, OJStat requires IDs to complete the URL of each indexer page such as Google Scholar, Copernicus Index, and others. To obtain this metric information, OJStat uses the Simple HTML Dom to retrieve content relevant to the journal’s metrics and then displays it on the OJStat metrics page. The information is general information that can be accessed via a direct URL.
There are two core OJStat files, namely a JavaScript file that will send data from the browser to the respective journal servers to be processed by a PHP file so that the data can be recorded in the database. The rest of the files are just a simple CRUD operation so that OJStat can create, view, modify, and delete data in the database that can only be accessed from within OJStat itself. OJStat is not designed to send data out of servers or domains. That is why OJStat cannot be used in separate domains.
To complete my intention to provide transparent information about OJStat, I would like to point out that the files in OJStat contain PHP and JavaScript code that are easy to read even for beginners like me. Don’t miss a single file. You may find flaws here and there, but you won’t find anything suspicious.
I apologize for this possibly redundant information.
It’s great that you go into detail and the effort you are taking to document and explain the application is much appreciated.
Thank you,
m.
This feature is now available in OJStat version 1.3. Thank you for your support. I seriously appreciate it.