Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes scholarly literature’s full text or metadata across an array of publishing formats. Here’s a complete guide to index your website on Google Scholar.
WordPress might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think about academic research. I never told my students to check out WordPress when teaching them about JSTOR, Google Scholar, EBSCO, ProjectMUSE, or any other scholarly database. But maybe I should have! It turns out that WordPress can be a boon to researchers and students alike. Google Scholar can automatically index your research if it is published using WordPress.
Main Benefits Of Google Scholer Indexing
It helps us find research papers and helps us invent research papers to advance science. Benefits of Google Scholar include:
- It is relatively easy to use and user-friendly, and the needs that the user intent document can be up immediately.
- It allows authors to search all types of scholarly literature on various topics, including grey literature such as conference proceedings.
- The result beats the search query keyword, which is H. It provides additional and other keyword-related information and helps users learn more.
- You can gain a wealth of knowledge at the touch of a button.
- You can browse profiles, publications, citations, and related publications of other authors.
- Find the entire document or add it to your library.
- You can keep up to date with the latest scientific developments in your field of study by creating alerts (located in the left column of the website).
- Build your academic profile and track your research citations as a Google Scholar website index advantage.
Why and How to Use WordPress for Your Research?
The research landscape can change rapidly. Your project might start heading in one direction but eventually, shift into another realm altogether. Because of this, some folks often blog about their project research as they go, granting a level of transparency to their work and inviting other professional input that may help you see things you might otherwise have overlooked or considered.
Plus, regularly updating your research using WordPress can keep your students engaged not only during the semesters they attend your class but also long afterward because they have become invested in the project. Or they might get interested in becoming your research assistant. At the very least, they will get a real-world look at what scholarly research looks like up-close, which, as we all know is starkly different from the classroom setting they are normally on.
And when all is said and done, WordPress is an excellent system to archive and display your publications and research in a much more welcoming way than many of the other databases out there.
Concerning how one uses WordPress with Google Scholar, it’s pretty simple. You don’t need to use any special plugins or customize your PHP files. You just copy/paste the paper into a new page or upload a PDF. How’s that for simple in guide to index your website on Google Scholar?
Starting Out Guide to Website Index In Google Scholar
The first thing is setting up your WordPress blog. The best scenario is getting it set up on your school’s domain so that you will have a .edu TLD. That’s important but not 100% necessary. It can help validate you to Google Scholar. Many colleges and universities already have multisite installations, and if yours doesn’t, ask the IT department. You can even refer them to how many colleges and institutions already use WP (including Harvard). Or to CampusPress. See? It’s a thing.
Once you’re set-up, it’s time to get to publishing. But before you do, I want to direct you to what Google Scholar says is and is not appropriate to publish for their consideration:
The content hosted on your website must consist primarily of scholarly articles – journal papers, conference papers, technical reports, or their drafts, dissertations, pre-prints, post-prints, or abstracts. Content such as news or magazine articles, book reviews, and editorials is not appropriate for Google Scholar.
It’s pretty standard stuff. You can publish your book reviews and editorials on your blog, though. Google Scholar isn’t necessarily discouraging that. They just won’t index it or guide it on Google Scholar.
Content Structure for Google Scholar
First, make sure you have a page on your site called Publications. That’s what Google Scholar wants it called, so let’s do what they say.
On this page, you will only link to the final draft that you want to be indexed on Google Scholar. This is not where you keep archives of any early drafts or notes leading up to the result. That sort of thing should be published using average blog posts.
Google Scholar prefers you to post links to PDF files that are no larger than 5MB and contain searchable text (that’s how they know to index them). You can add PDFs to your media library, like photos or videos.
Then, simply link to that file’s permalink to make Google Scholar’s crawlers happy.
You can also publish the entire article in HTML, too. That just means you will add a new blog post or (preferably a page in WordPress with the full text of the final draft to be want to be indexed.
A Note on Formatting
Google Scholar provides some strict rules you’ll need to follow to ensure you’re eligible for indexing. They primarily dictate formatting and content structure. I assume you’re used to that, given that you already write in APA, Chicago, MLA, or another specialized manuscript format. This is no different (a lot simpler, though).
- Firstly, the full text of your paper is in a PDF file that ends with “.pdf”.
- Secondly, the article’s title appears in a large font on top of the first page.
- The paper’s authors are listed right below the title on a separate line.
- Finally, there’s a bibliography section titled, e.g., “References” or “Bibliography” at the end.
Publishing the Publications on Google Scholar
Then, you can design your site to look however you want, but as long as you have those PDF permalinks on your Publications page, Google Scholar will eventually make its way there. Styling isn’t necessarily necessary; you could leave it a simple, bulleted list. However, make your page look professional if you want to be taken seriously.
I quickly edited the Divi LMS layout’s Course page because it’s made of simple text boxes that are easy to adapt into a kind of mini-CV with abstracts and links. Google Scholar is also pretty particular about how it displays the abstracts and info.
To be included, your website must make the full text of the articles or their complete author-written abstracts freely available and accessible to see when users click on your URLs in Google search results.
Basically, it has to be easy to get to, and your readers can’t click through many ads, CAPTCHAs, or email opt-ins. Google Scholar is about the free flow of information, so your WordPress site has to abide by those same principles.
If You Don’t Get Indexed
Even if you do everything above the .edu domain, clean and easy-to-access abstracts and perfectly formatted documents. There’s a chance you won’t get found by Google Scholar as you would via the standard Google crawlers. Fear not, my friend. There’s a manual way to submit your scholarship, too.
It’s not complicated. You just tell them it’s a Personal Publication because you’re not representing a journal or database, and then fill out the form based on what we did above. You make sure you have different URLs for each article, a publications page (they call this the browser interface), and down the list.
I want to note that when they ask for article examples, these are for the final, published versions, not the Publications page or even an abstract page if that leads into the last article. The example URLs they provide are for the PDF’s permalink. The direct link to the full-text HTML version should also work, but why tempt fate?
After that, it’s time to sit back, relax, and wait to get indexed.
Class Dismissed
That wasn’t bad, was it? The best part about how Google Scholar finds articles to the index is that you don’t have to take arbitrary steps. You don’t have to install a plugin or add a script to your page footer. And you luckily can leave your functions.php alone.
You just need an organized and easily navigated archive page and properly formatted manuscripts. And if you’re looking to become indexed on Google Scholar in the first place, you’ve got lots of practice at that.
What has been your experience with Google Scholar? Any tips or tricks?
