What is "gs_meta_revision" used for?

ojsbsb · March 23, 2016, 2:52pm

Hi,

I’d like to ask about the meta tag <meta name="gs_meta_revision" content="1.1" /> - when I noticed it in the HTML source code produced by OJS, I thought “cool, this is a versioning for metadata, telling crawlers when metadata changed”. However, now I found that this number is hardcoded in a template file:

github.com

pkp/ojs/blob/ojs-dev-2_4/templates/article/googlescholar.tpl#L11


{**
 * templates/article/googlescholar.tpl
 *
 * Copyright (c) 2013-2019 Simon Fraser University
 * Copyright (c) 2003-2019 John Willinsky
 * Distributed under the GNU GPL v2. For full terms see the file docs/COPYING.
 *
 * Metadata elements for articles based on preferred types for Google Scholar
 *
 *}
	<meta name="gs_meta_revision" content="1.1" />
	<meta name="citation_journal_title" content="{$currentJournal->getLocalizedTitle()|strip_tags|escape}"/>
{if $currentJournal->getSetting('onlineIssn')}{assign var="issn" value=$currentJournal->getSetting('onlineIssn')}
{elseif $currentJournal->getSetting('printIssn')}{assign var="issn" value=$currentJournal->getSetting('printIssn')}
{elseif $currentJournal->getSetting('issn')}{assign var="issn" value=$currentJournal->getSetting('issn')}
{/if}
{if $issn}
	<meta name="citation_issn" content="{$issn|strip_tags|escape}"/>
{/if}
{foreach name="authors" from=$article->getAuthors() item=author}
        <meta name="citation_author" content="{$author->getFirstName()|escape}{if $author->getMiddleName() != ""} {$author->getMiddleName()|escape}{/if} {$author->getLastName()|escape}"/>

In web search results, there are mostly OJS-driven sites coming up, but no documentation on what that tag means. Could anyone give me a hint what it is used for? Thanks!

asmecher · March 23, 2016, 3:20pm

Hi @ojsbsb,

Google Scholar’s meta tag documentation isn’t complete (as far as I’m aware), but as I recall that’s to identify to Google Scholar that the metadata characteristics provided by OJS are an improved revision of the original Google Scholar support in OJS.

Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team