Google Scholar can boost the worldwide visibility and accessibility of your content. We work with publishers of scholarly information to index peer-reviewed papers, theses, preprints, abstracts, and technical reports from all disciplines of research and make them searchable on Google and Google Scholar.
This section provides policy and technical information for scholarly publishers and societies. Detailed technical inclusion guidelines for webmasters can be found here.
Indexing Policies
Multiple versions of a work are grouped to improve its ranking
In many research areas versions of a work may appear as preprints and conference papers before being published as a journal article. These preliminary versions of a work are often cited in addition to the authoritative journal version. The number of citations to a particular work is an important part of determining its rank in the Google Scholar search results. Grouping versions allows us to collect all citations to all versions of a work. In practice, this can significantly improve the position of an article in the search results.
Publisher's full-text, if indexed, is the primary version
When multiple versions of a work are indexed, we select the full and authoritative text from the publisher as the primary version. We can only do this if we are able to successfully identify, crawl and process the full text of the publisher's version.
Publishers have control over access to their articles
We work with publishers to preserve their control over access to their content and only cache articles and papers that don't have access restrictions. Publishers can help us by identifying the regions of their sites that have access restrictions.
Google users must see at least the complete abstract or the first full page
This is a necessary component of our indexing program. For papers with access restrictions, all users clicking on search results must see at least the full author-written abstract or the first full page of the article without requiring to login or click on additional links.
We will respond to complaints regarding copyright infringement
Our policy is to respond to all notices of alleged copyright infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For directions and more information, please click here.
Subscriber Links Policies
Google's use of electronic holdings information
We will use electronic holdings information for generating per article links in our search results to publisher servers. We will not share this information with third parties or use it for marketing purposes.
Electronic holdings usage information
We will not share information with third parties on the usage of your electronic holdings or on aggregate usage based on institutional characteristics or profiles.
Publishers can withdraw electronic holdings information
Once the electronic holdings information is no longer available to our search robots, we will stop using it within 30 days.
General Questions
We would love to work with you. As noted in the policies, an abstract (at least) of each work must be available to non-subscribers who come from Google and Google Scholar. Please configure your website according to our technical inclusion guidelines.
Maybe. Google Scholar indexes mostly scholarly articles. For textbooks and monographs, we recommend Google Book Search. Google Scholar automatically includes scholarly works from Google Book Search.
Since users click through to your website, your web server logs should have all the usage statistics.
It is our policy to respond to notices of alleged infringement that comply with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For directions and more information, please click here.
Technical Questions
Yes. We can index PDF articles as long as they're searchable and as long as their size doesn't exceed 5MB. For larger documents and for scanned images that require OCR, we recommend Google Book Search.
Open the file in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click 'Find' (look for the binocular icon), and confirm that you can search for and find several words on the page.
Alas, we can't. We can index only one file per article at the moment.
Refer to Google webmaster help.
Add the following robots meta-tag to the <head> section of your webpage:
If we're showing 'Cached' links for your restricted-access content, please email us specific examples of where the links appear. Display of cached links for restricted-access content isn't intentional, but may happen if our methodical crawlers accidentally discover a forgotten alternative interface to your content. You'll need to tell us of all such interfaces, because crawlers can go places where you least expect them. Please email us and we'll look into it.
If you believe another site is infringing your copyright, please see our directions on the DMCA process.
Add the following robots meta-tag to the <head> section of your webpage:
If we're showing unwanted Quick Abstracts for your restricted-access content, please email us specific examples of where the abstracts appear. Display of unwanted Quick Abstracts for restricted-access content isn't intentional, but may happen if our methodical crawlers accidentally discover a forgotten alternative interface to your content. You'll need to tell us of all such interfaces, because crawlers can go places where you least expect them. Please email us and we'll look into it.
If you believe another site is infringing your copyright, please see our directions on the DMCA process.
Indeed you can. Our indexing algorithms automatically extract bibliographic data, citations and other information from articles and use it for ranking purposes. Providing authoritative metadata about your articles can help facilitate this and can increase the likelihood of identifying all the citations to your articles. We strongly recommend this approach. Please refer to the following technical inclusion guidelines for the details of how to implement it.
Yes. Gaps in coverage are certainly not intentional; but they could be caused by a number of different technical issues in the automatic processing of your website by our search robots. The troubleshooting section in our technical inclusion guidelines describes ways to identify and fix common coverage issues. We encourage you to take a look.