The Journal of Scholarly Publishing just published our article Academic Search Engine Optimization (ASEO): Optimizing Scholarly Literature for Google Scholar and Co. The article introduces and discusses the concept of what we call “academic search engine optimization” (ASEO) and define as: “Academic search engine optimization is the creation, publication, and modification of scholarly literature in a way that makes it easier for academic search engines to both crawl it and index it”.
Based on three recently conducted studies, guidelines are provided on how to optimize scholarly literature for academic search engines in general and for Google Scholar in particular. In addition, we briefly discuss the risk of researchers’ illegitimately ‘over-optimizing’ their articles.
Probably not everyone will agree with the article. We ourselves are not 100% sure up to what point ASEO is good and when it becomes harmful. We hope to stimulate a discussion about ASEO and are looking forward for your feedback :-).
The pre-print is available for free download.