Market or perish - Academic SEO

Publish or Perish
???
Jason Hoyt, Ph.D.
Chief Scientist + VP of R&D
Mendeley Open Office Talks
26 Nov 2010
twitter: @jasonHoyt

Academics should learn how to market themselves; Lady Gaga style.
Creative Commons licensed
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ladygaga_b8dn415_1209.jpg

Market yourself
Or get of academia now. Visibility = Citations = Tenure
We have grant writing courses to help our careers, but nothing about marketing our research.
Marketing in this case isn’t a dirty word. It’s simply making our research visible.

Self-archiving
#1 Marketing Tool. Publishing is no longer enough.
Self-archiving should occur before (pre-prints), during, and after (post-print) we publish

Self-archiving
The juicy secrets.
58% of publishers allow it
That 58% covers 83% of all journals
41% of publishers allow pre-prints

ASBMB
ASCB
BioMed Central
Blackwell Publishing
BMJ Publishing Group
Cambridge University Press
Elsevier (except journals of Cell Press)
Humana Press
Nature Publishing Group
Oxford Journals
PNAS
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
SAGE
Springer
Taylor & Francis
Wiley
Many more…
Visit Sherpa Romeo for publisher/journal specifics
A small sample.
Who allows pre-prints?

Why do publishers allow pre-prints?
Impact Factor Cherry Picking
Pre-prints help publishers gauge what they should publish
A popular pre-print can jump the line in a giant 12-18 month backlog

Search engines are key to marketing our research.
Search Engines
This is known as Academic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

What’s the coverage?
People search aggregators that have the coverage. Focus on the aggregators.

Ranking algorithms
Understand the basics of how search engines rank literature.
We’ll look at the biggest Search Engines. Mendeley, Google Scholar, & PubMed

Pubmed
Content Relevance
Title
Abstract
MeSH terms
Synonyms
‘Freshness’ How recent is the publication?

Google Scholar
Content Relevance
Citation count
Impact factor of journal
Freshness of cited by
Who authored the paper
Quality of metadata

Mendeley
Content Relevance
Quality of metadata
Readership
‘Freshness’
Citations (future)
Quality of metadata means how complete is it? Abstract, full-text to be found?

Google Scholar
Mendeley
?
GS favors citation count too strongly. Expected result is 5th on GS.

Improving your visibility
So we’ve seen how Mendeley, PubMed, & GS rank.
What can we do to make sure our research is properly included & ranked?

After you Publish
For Mendeley users
Make sure we have complete metadata & abstract at least
Use Tags – Google will also index these on Mendeley article pages. Remember synonyms.
Author keywords – Make sure they are extracted or copy them in. Google also indexes these
External links. Do you have the URL to your self-archive? Google will find these as well as people searching on Mendeley. Use the URL field! And use the DOI link.
Create a public group for your paper and similar ones. Google indexes these as well.
When self-archiving, make sure your Web page (or University’s) uses CoiNS and meta tags (e.g. Eprints, Highwire). Google and Mendeley both index these.
Before & when you publish
Use synonyms in title/abstract
Use vector graphics for figures/tables text (SVG is XML and can be indexed)
Mendeley & GS will rank papers with abstracts and a pre-print or full-text available slightly higher than those without.
If you forgot synonyms when you published, it isn’t too late. Put them in the tags field on Mendeley. People often search for synonyms.

This is from the ‘My Publications’ folder in Mendeley. It’s for papers I authored.
It’s a paper that I co-authored back in the day. I could add more tags with synonyms. This might improve its visibility years after being published. I should also create a public group for it.

This is Chris Wiggins’ faculty page at Columbia.

His ‘papers’ link on the left displays his Mendeley profile. He doesn’t need to rely on the school IT to update his CV.
All of his papers are updated in real-time from his ‘My Publications’ folder in Mendeley

Ethical boundaries
black hat vs. white hat SEO for academia
There is a line to ‘marketing’ or Academic SEO that shouldn’t be crossed.

Aalst, J. van (2010). Using Google Scholar to Estimate the Impact of Journal Articles in Education. Educational Researcher 39, 387-400. Available at: http://edr.sagepub.com/cgi/doi/10.3102/0013189X10371120
Bakkalbasi, N., Bauer, K., Glover, J., and Wang, L. (2006). Three options for citation tracking: Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science. Biomedical digital libraries 3, 7. Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16805916
Beel, J., Vlba-lab, F. I. N. I. T. I., and Wilde, E. (2010). Academic Search Engine Optimization ( ASEO ): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar & Co . Journal of Scholarly Publishing 41. Available at:
http://dx.doi.org/10.3138/jsp.41.2.176
Mikki, S. (2009). Comparing Google Scholar and ISI Web of Science for Earth Sciences. Scientometrics 82, 321-331. Available at: http://www.springerlink.com/index/10.1007/s11192-009-0038-6
Further reading

Publish or Perish
Market &

http://www.mendeley.com	752
http://d.hatena.ne.jp	214
http://academicvisibility.blogspot.com	131
http://blog.mendeley.com	99
http://www.scienceblogs.de	76
http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk	18
http://feeds.feedburner.com	5
https://www.mendeley.com	4
http://translate.googleusercontent.com	2
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com	1
https://twimg0-a.akamaihd.net	1

Market or perish - Academic SEO

by Jason Hoyt on Nov 29, 2010

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