Why no DOI, ORCID, ISSN, ISBN in Google Scholar

May 3, 2019 4:39 PM

I like Google Scholar a lot but it does not use the standards for bibliographic and author identification. Why is that?

For background:
DOI (org site) | wiki ref

ORCID (org site) | wiki ref

ISBN (organization definition) | wiki ref

ISSN (org ref) | British Library FAQ

An answer I found on StackExchange

But it seems a bit unsatisfactory to provide an index of scholarly works without the standards in scholarly indexing. Google Scholar does not offer the option of letting the researcher put in their ORCID number or even crowdsourcing DOI, ISBN, ISSN, or PMID (PubMed ID) if the concern is server response time for results. We do have a precedent of users updating information in Google such as Maps.

So librarians, scholars, researchers, and developers, why an index that does not incorporate the standards of indexing? Legal issues? Technical concerns? Lack of development?

If I am wrong on these points please do show me how to get the information integrated into my gScholar results.

posted by jadepearl to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Only Google can tell you why, authoritatively. My understanding is that that offering search by DOI is not considered profitable and would incur some expense on their part.

Let’s not forget Google is in the business of making money, and their interest in facilitating scholarship at no cost to users ends exactly where they think their cost/benefit analysis says it does. At the end of the day, their offerings are governed by profit and capitalism, not scholarship or the greater good.

I will note many articles that have DOIs attached do include that DOI on their google scholar record.

I will also note that both OrcID and DOI allow searching based on those, at their home (NONPROFIT) web portals.
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:15 PM on May 3, 2019 [4 favorites]

Best answer: So librarians, scholars, researchers, and developers, why an index that does not incorporate the standards of indexing? Legal issues? Technical concerns? Lack of development?

Because Google sucks and authority control (which is what that would entail) costs money. They only want scaleable solutions and dealing with FRBRizing author ID doesn't scale well. Same thing with the Internet Archive (tho they don't suck). Google isn't a library they're the world's largest advertising company.
posted by jessamyn at 6:57 PM on May 3, 2019 [10 favorites]

Not quite the answer you want perhaps, but these things are not standard across all academic disciplines. I'm an academic, I use google scholar daily, our citation practices don't require any of the things you are listing. MLA, APA, Chicago style etc cover most (if not all) non-STEM fields.
posted by EllaEm at 5:47 AM on May 4, 2019 [1 favorite]

Because they don't want to, and no one pays them to.

But it's not really their thing, though, you know? They're about search. Like, you can definitely *search* for a DOI in Google Scholar, and that publication is likely to be your first result (if it's in Google Scholar at all, which not everything is, obviously). Or you can *search* for an ISSN, and you'll get hundreds/thousands of pages of results from that journal (or at least the version of that journal that was assigned that ISSN). You can even search for an ORCID and get relevant hits (if the author has an ORCID, and has published somewhere that includes ORCID's in the text).

Disambiguation isn't really their business model, though, and they aren't all that motivated to ensure the meaningful/standardized reuse of content or metadata, because it's not their content or their metadata.
posted by unknowncommand at 9:20 AM on May 4, 2019

Response by poster: So, if any gScholar developers are reading, one of the improvements is to allow scholars to enter their ORCID which can then hit the main ORCID site or even just list it on the profile page of the author ao people can find it. At the simplest, you just need a simple field on the profile form. I am saying that this is a real low hanging fruit here.

In any case, I get it; not sexy, not scalable, not making rain happen. Google needs to change their company mission statement.
posted by jadepearl at 7:45 PM on May 7, 2019