Problems with indexing under Google Scholar

[MartinBeseda]

Hello everybody, recently (~ 4 weeks ago) we've published a paper under JOSS (https://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.06036), while the pre-print was published on ArXiv before (https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.11884).

Today I found a puzzling thing, where the JOSS paper is not indexed by Google Scholar yet (while ArXiv is indexed in the matter of days), but it "returns" the ArXiv pre-print, when looking for JOSS DOI.

I'm not sure, what's happening here, as GS seems to find the DOI correctly together with the paper's title, but it seems unable to index the JOSS page, so it resorts to returning only ArXiv version, which is visible. Now, as the crawler clearly found the title corresponding to DOI already, I find this a little disturbing.

This issue may or may not be directly connected to problems mentioned in #130 .

[arfon]

I'm not sure, what's happening here, as GS seems to find the DOI correctly together with the paper's title, but it seems unable to index the JOSS page, so it resorts to returning only ArXiv version, which is visible. Now, as the crawler clearly found the title corresponding to DOI already, I find this a little disturbing.

I don't think we know that this is the case (that Google Scholar can't index the JOSS page). A quick check of a random paper from two weeks ago finds the JOSS record correctly: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22Statmanager-kr%3A+A+User-friendly+Statistical+Package+for+Python+in+Pandas%22&btnG=

My guess is that there's something weird going on here with Scholar and the fact that the paper is also on arXiv.

Other than ensuring that the correct metadata are present (which they are for your paper), unfortunately this team has no control over how Google Scholar behaves.

As such, I'd encourage you to take this up with the Google Scholar team.

[sneakers-the-rat]

I'm asking some scholcomm people if there's anything extra we need to do to indicate that the JOSS version is the version of record that google scholar would recognize, but looking at a few big journal sites they don't seem to do anything special.

I am pretty sure you can control which link is presented as the primary link if you have claimed a work as yours in your google scholar profile (and also manually add the joss entry), but i am not seeing those NISO RP-8 tags for indicating version of record being rolled out in html metadata anywhere

[MartinBeseda]

@sneakers-the-rat I certainly can, but, if I do add the paper manually, no citations of the DOI will be listed at GS, am I right?

[sneakers-the-rat]

I think they will, but dont quote me! from what i recall, you can also add the DOI to a manual entry, and google scholar will automatically merge multiple sources of the same document (i think you can also do merges explicitly as well)

[MartinBeseda]

@sneakers-the-rat OK, I'll have a look at these options :) Also, I'd like to see, if the situation changes, if I do upload "Related DOI" of JOSS publication to ArXiv.

[logological]

from what i recall, you can also add the DOI to a manual entry

I don't believe this is true. I tried manually adding an entry to my Google Scholar profile just now and the form I was presented with had no field to enter a DOI. Others have reported the same issue as far back as 2017.

[sneakers-the-rat]

huh looks like you're right, my bad