Received citations as a main SEO factor of Google Scholar results ranking

Rovira, Cristòfol; Guerrero-Solé, Frederic; Codina, Lluís

doi:10.3145/epi.2018.may.09

Cited by 29 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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Order By: Relevance

“…The number of citations received is a very important factor in Google Scholar relevance rankings, so that documents with a high number of citations received tend to be ranked first [32][33][34]. -Documents with many citations received have more readers and more citations and, in this way, consolidate their top position [61].…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…No [40] No [41] Received citations ? Yes [16,[31][32][33][34] Yes [35][36][37][38]64] No [40] No [41] Author reputation…”

Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies that have applied a reverse engineering methodology to Google Scholar have shown that citation counts are one of the key factors in relevance ranking [31][32][33][34]. Microsoft Academic, on the other hand, has received less attention from the scientific community [35][36][37][38] and there are no specific studies of the quality of its relevance ranking.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Do citations received have a similarly strong influence on all these systems? A similar approach to the one adopted here has been taken in previous studies of the factors involved in the ranking of scholarly literature [22,23,[31][32][33][34].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We then report, analyze and discuss the results obtained before concluding with a consideration of the repercussions of these results and possible new avenues of research. However, few studies [43,62] have focused their attention on information retrieval and the search efficiency of academic search engines, while even fewer papers [22,23,[31][32][33][34] have examined the factors used in ranking algorithms.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 4 more Smart Citations

Ranking by Relevance and Citation Counts, a Comparative Study: Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, WoS and Scopus

et al. 2019

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Search engine optimization (SEO) constitutes the set of methods designed to increase the visibility of, and the number of visits to, a web page by means of its ranking on the search engine results pages. Recently, SEO has also been applied to academic databases and search engines, in a trend that is in constant growth. This new approach, known as academic SEO (ASEO), has generated a field of study with considerable future growth potential due to the impact of open science. The study reported here forms part of this new field of analysis. The ranking of results is a key aspect in any information system since it determines the way in which these results are presented to the user. The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the relevance ranking algorithms employed by various academic platforms to identify the importance of citations received in their algorithms. Specifically, we analyze two search engines and two bibliographic databases: Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic, on the one hand, and Web of Science and Scopus, on the other. A reverse engineering methodology is employed based on the statistical analysis of Spearman’s correlation coefficients. The results indicate that the ranking algorithms used by Google Scholar and Microsoft are the two that are most heavily influenced by citations received. Indeed, citation counts are clearly the main SEO factor in these academic search engines. An unexpected finding is that, at certain points in time, Web of Science (WoS) used citations received as a key ranking factor, despite the fact that WoS support documents claim this factor does not intervene.

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Section: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%