Google Scholar link returning incorrect result set

[npeterson]

When I select the GS links (either the related articles or look for citations) for two of the articles published on Feb 2nd, the title of the article is not indicated - instead GS says:

Sorry, we didn't find any articles related to PLoS: 0 notes 0 comments.

see also enclosed screenshot.

 http://www.plosone.org/article/related/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004310  http://www.plosone.org/article/related/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004298

I looked at other articles in Feb - eg on Feb 3rd, and the links seemed to be working properly. Is there something wrong just with the articles published on Feb 2nd?

[npeterson]

eg this article

 http://plosmedicine-demo.plos.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0020124

has no citations on GS when you click the link but I think that's because it is searching with the wrong search string ie it searches with

 http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124.

if you search with just the doi

doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 you get 353 citations

Andy thinks this is also causing a problem on the searching of google blogs

[npeterson]

Not sure if it's been already reported or considered, but I'm not convinced that the Google Scholar functionality is working as well as it could.

For example, for  http://plosgenetics-demo.plos.org/article/related/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0030050 [^{] ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&cites=http%3A%2F%2Fdx.plos.org%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pgen.0030050 [}] ), the first result (based on DOI in the search term?) is a Genetics Soc America article.

However, if you pull in author and title within the Scholar search term, like Bio and Medicine, you seem to get the correct article at the top more often:  http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv/?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040125 [^{] ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:M+author:Nomura+Polymorphisms,+Mutations,+and+Amplification+of+the+EGFR+Gene+in+Non-Small+Cell+Lung+Cancers [}] )

A similar search mechanism (author + title, not doi) applied to the first article above only pulls up the relevant article ( http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=author:M+author:Johnson-Schlitz+Multiple-Pathway+Analysis+of+Double-Strand+Break+Repair+Mutations+in+Drosophila [^{] )}

Is this something to consider changing (to bring up what appear to be more accurate results)?

[josowski]

We might switch to title/author:

 http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=%22Modulation+of+the+%CE%B2-Catenin+Signaling+Pathway+by+the+Dishevelled-Associated+Protein+Hipk1%22+author%3A%22Sarah+H.+Louie%22&btnG=Search

BUT we would have no direct link to citations or related articles at this point. That is, the user would have to go to scholar by the above link and then click on citations or related. But this won't fix the issue with newly published articles.

The root of the issue here is the Google search index is out of date. To my knowledge there is no way to force google to crawl our sites more frequently, we just have to wait it out.

[josowski]

I made this change in r7690

[josowski]

Sorry, got my trac items confused...

[josowski]

We're banking on this being fixed by the need google feed we're providing. It's going to take time to verify.

[npeterson]

Some further refinements are needed to the Google Scholar feed in the next Sprint, but as far as I can tell this is working as it should be.