Our content was smoothly indexed by Google Scholar, even on sunday 24 November we still noticed some new indexed published content updates in Google-Scholar. However, starting on Monday, November 25, we noticed that all of our previously indexed content has disappeared from the platform, as if it no longer exists.
and now there is only one recored from researchgate here when searching soapubs.com
We have thoroughly checked our setup and confirmed that our metadata complies with Google Scholarâs requirements. We are using Open Journal Systems (OJS), and the Googlebot is able to access our pages in under 10 seconds. We also ensure that each article has proper links to the abstract, PDF, and other relevant content.
Besides, There is something I want to clarify, I added some codes to the custom header pluginâs footer content, aiming to changed text âaffiliationâ to text âphone numberâ shown in the author registration stage, the reason I mentioned this is that because after this action all content can not be found in GS, so I guess this might be the reason
script type=âtext/javascriptâ>
document.addEventListener(âDOMContentLoadedâ, function() {
// Find the affiliation label
var affiliationLabel = document.querySelector(â.form-group.affiliation labelâ);
// Make sure the label exists
if (affiliationLabel) {
// Directly modify the text content of the label to âPhone Numberâ
affiliationLabel.innerHTML = affiliationLabel.innerHTML.replace(âAffiliationâ, âPhone Numberâ);
} else {
console.error(âAffiliation label not foundâ);
}
});
script type=âtext/javascriptâ>
document.addEventListener(âDOMContentLoadedâ, function() {
// Find the .label label inside affiliation
var affiliationLabel = document.querySelector(â.affiliation .labelâ);
// Make sure .label label exists
if (affiliationLabel) {
// Only modify the text content of âAffiliationâ to âPhone Numberâ
var labelTextNode = affiliationLabel.childNodes[0]; // Get the first child node (text node)
if (labelTextNode && labelTextNode.nodeType === Node.TEXT_NODE) ââ{
labelTextNode.textContent = "Phone Number ";
}
} else {
console.error(âAffiliation label not foundâ);
}
});
Could you and the PKP team kindly help us understand the root cause of this issue? If there is anything further we can do to resolve it or any suggestions to get our content re-indexed, we would greatly appreciate your guidance.
Dear @mpbraendle, many thanks for your message, its my fault, just want to open a new post.
Regarding your suggestions, it is a good idea, but the difficulties is that there is only an email left there on their official website, and I have heard that they do not often check their email box.
I saw in community that many colleagues have similar issues like mine, just wondering if they have solved their issues.
(former google employee here). The google crawler definitely executes javascript after it crawls a page, but there is no guarantee that the results would be used in the indexed content. See this documentation. There is rather little public information about what Google Scholar chooses to include in their index or how they post-process the crawled information. My understanding is that they generally recognize OJS sites, and will probably index it if all other criterion are satisfied. There are constraints like the fact that files must be under 5MB, and the fact that everything should have an abstract. My suspicion is that they may now use a machine learning process to decide if content looks like scholarly material - otherwise google scholar would be vulnerable to spam. See their inclusion guidelines.
Youâre absolutely right, and I agree with your points. However, what I want to clarify is that we are confident we meet Googleâs indexing requirements. To summarize, the key criteria are having a direct-access abstract, PDFs under 5MB, and the correct meta name tags. For OJS users, they generally have the Dublin Core Indexing Plugin and Google Scholar Indexing Plugin enabled, and Iâve checked our publications to confirm that their meta names are correctâat least for the ones Iâve reviewed. Furthermore, weâve followed the suggestions provided by both PKP and Google Scholar, such as ensuring consistency in language and content.
In short, itâs very strange that our entire journal cannot be found within a day of searching. Honestly, I donât have much expertise in web technologies, and my knowledge is primarily in journal management. However, I am now able to check if we meet Google Scholarâs indexing requirements on my own. If youâre willing, could you take a look at our websiteâs source code? There doesnât seem to be any issue, but the articles are mysteriously not showing up: https://soapubs.com/index.php/EI/article/view/161
If I were to guess, perhaps itâs related to the quality of our articles not meeting Google Scholarâs internal, somewhat opaque requirements, or maybe itâs an issue with our IP (China) preventing us from appearing on Google?
Iâm not really an OJS user, and Google Scholar is an opaque service that is impossible to predict or control. One thing you might try is to encourage authors to create Google scholar profiles and add their papers to their profile. Ultimately I think it also depends upon whether other journals that you donât manage also cite your DOIs. This impossible for you to control, but scholar probably uses these as indicators for quality of content. If something doesnât have a sufficiently high H-index, then it may fail to be indexed. These things take time - sometimes years.
To be honest, I wouldnât be surprised if Google Scholar just goes away in the future once the founders retire. Scholar is a hard thing to run and is vulnerable to all sorts of spam and manipulation. Itâs not an important product for the company, and the company has a habit of tearing things down if they donât like running them (e.g., Google+, Google Reader, Chromecast, Google Podcasts, etc). Microsoft discontinued their academic search project in 2021, and handed the data over to openalex.org.
There are a lot of âme tooâ threads about recent Google Scholar issues, so Iâll direct them into one place and close off the other threads in order to help organize the forum.
Iâll leave this thread open:
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team
