Google Scholar suddenly no longer indexing a paper - how to fix?

[Jonathan Eaton]

Has any list member encountered the following scenario with Google Scholar?

If so, how did they manage to resolve it?

Problem description


-          A senior professor reported to me that Google Scholar had abruptly stopped indexing one of his early career papers from the 1970s (published in a top-ranked peer reviewed journal)



-          The paper had about 200 citations in GS



-          But it has suddenly stopped appearing in GS search results despite the GS indexing and returning in results the other (adjacent) papers in the same journal / volume & issue


Steps taken


-          Checked with publisher's production editor.  Metadata and DOI all correct on publisher's website



-          Interestingly, all other articles in the same issue of the journal are being indexed / returned in Scholar results (even the papers published either side of his in the sequence)



-          Professor and I have separately tried to contact Google about this, to no avail (only automated support responses; no indication of when might be re-crawled)



-          I even created a free-standing simple web page containing the "missing" article's correct metadata & DOI, formatted exactly per Google Scholar metadata requirements but after 2 months this has not fixed the problem


At the moment, we have not yet launched our Open Access repository that might help address this by programmatically exposing the article's metadata for Google and wider OAI-PMH harvest (still 3-plus months away).

Any advice would be welcomed as our professor is somewhat mystified (and not a little frustrated) to have seen a career-founding paper suddenly lost from the global "map" along with its Google Scholar citations.

Thanks in advance.

Regards

Jonathan Eaton


_________________________________

Jonathan Eaton | Senior Content & Systems Manager | IT-Library
London Business School | Regent's Park | London NW1 4SA | United Kingdom
Direct line +44 (0)20 7000 7636 | Email jeaton at london.edu<mailto:jeaton at london.edu> | Twitter [cid:image001.jpg at 01CFCE70.ED037700] <http://www.twitter.com/LBS_LibraryTeam> @LBS_LibraryTeam<http://www.twitter.com/LBS_LibraryTeam>

www.london.edu<http://www.london.edu/> | London experience. World impact.

[cid:image003.jpg at 01CFCE70.ED037700]

Please consider the environment before printing this email


============================

To unsubscribe: http://bit.ly/web4lib

Web4Lib Web Site: http://web4lib.org/

2015-09-24
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.nd.edu/pipermail/web4lib/attachments/20150924/826d7362/attachment.htm>