Academic Search Engine Optimization in Google Scholar
Search engine optimization (SEO) has a golden age in this internet era, but to use it in academic research, it sounds quite strange for me. After reading this publication (pdf) focusing on this issue, my opinion changed. Actually I think many researchers have been structuring their papers based on this concept for years.
This article introduces and discusses the concept of academic search engine optimization (ASEO). Based on three recently conducted studies, guidelines are provided on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines in general and for Google Scholar in particular. In addition, we briefly discuss the risk of researchers’ illegitimately ‘over-optimizing’ their articles.
Discussion:
ASEO should not be seen as a guide on how to cheat academic search engines. Rather, it is about helping academic search engines to understand the content of research papers and, thus, about how to make this content more widely and easily available. Certainly, we can anticipate that some researchers will try to boost their rankings in illegitimate ways. However, the same problem exists in regular Web searching; and eventually Web search engines manage to avoid spam with considerable success, and so will academic search engines. In the long term, ASEO will be beneficial for all – authors, search engines, and users of search engines. Therefore, we believe that academic search engine optimization (ASEO) should be a common procedure for researchers, similar to, for instance, selecting an appropriate journal for publication.
Hi, Berci, there are several issues related to Google Scholar and ASEO.
1. Academic search engines, such as MEDLINE, include only journals that fulfil certain criteria. Google Scholar seems to be an open access engine. This is not good for academic community, because anybody can start a journal and publish, but not all publications are good. Aside from citations, if ASEO is optimal, this means that some low quality publications may have a moderate/high ranking just based on the number of citations. Furthermore, citations per se do not ensure quality, in some cases the opposite is true – publications are sometimes cited in a negative context (e.g error in research method).
2. I checked with my own publications. The number of citations is more important than the journal’s impact factor (IF) or the year of publication of a certain paper. Some of my papers in journals with lower IF are ranked higher than papers in journals with higher IF simply because of the number of citations. This is certainly not in favour of most recently published papers which may be of highest quality.
3. I know that Google Scholar is trying to become more popular than other academic search engines, but this is probably not going to happen any time soon. Science and the publication process have certain rules and expectations which Google Scholar does not meet at the moment. At least in the medical field, MEDLINE is the academic search engine No.1. I haven’t met a single researcher or reviewer who prefers Google Scholar to MEDLINE. MEDLINE’s selection criteria ensure at least some quality of published research, its search engine is based on MeSH (Medical Subject Headings) vocabulary, and papers are listed in the chronological order with most recent being on top. This doesn’t imply the quality of research, its upon any one researcher to determine based on the content of the paper and the impact factor of the journal. With such simple rules, there is no chance that my conference abstract may appear before my high quality paper. In MEDLINE there is no ranking which might be completely misleading since the quantity (citations) does not necessarily mean quality.
hello, i am one of the authors of the mentioned article. just in case you are interested in the three studies that are mentioned in the article (more details on google scholar’s ranking algorithm): they are all available on http://www.sciplore.org/publications_en.php
Going to leave a comment now, before I’ve read the article, saying that on first impressions it sounds like the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. We’re supposed to be getting past judging research based on a single number, anyways. I’ll come back once I’ve read the article.
ASEO sounds good to me. I think it’s a good idea.
Good Article..
thanks for your seo tips, it helps my seo job.
Thank you for the interesting article
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Nice little hints. Thanks for sharing.
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