Enrique Orduña-Malea Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Cristina I. Font-Julián Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Jorge Serrano-Cobos Universitat Politècnica de València, Spain
Source
Scientometrics (2024)
DOI: 10.1007/s11192-024-05175-0
Abstract
Given the importance of Google Search in generating visits to institutional repositories (IR), a lack of visibility in search engine results pages can hinder the possibility of their publications being found, read, downloaded, and, eventually, cited. To address this, institutions need to evaluate the visibility of their repositories to determine what actions might be implemented to enhance them. However, measuring the search engine optimization (SEO) visibility of IRs requires a highly accurate, technically feasible method. This study constitutes the first attempt to design such a method, specifically applied here to measuring the IR visibility of Spain’s national university system in Google Search based on a set of SEO-based metrics derived from the Ubersuggest SEO tool. A comprehensive dataset spanning three months and comprising 217,589 bibliographic records and 316,899 organic keywords is used as a baseline. Our findings show that many records deposited in these repositories are not ranked among the top positions in Google Search results, and that the most visible records are mainly academic works (theses and dissertations) written in Spanish in the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, most visits are generated by a small number of records. All in all, our results call into question the role played by IRs in attracting readers via Google Search to the institutions’ scientific heritage and serve to underscore the prevailing emphasis within IRs on preservation as opposed to online dissemination. Potential improvements might be achieved using enhanced metadata schemes and normalized description practices, as well as by adopting other actionable insights that can strengthen the online visibility of IRs. This study increases understanding of the role played by web indicators in assessing the web-based impact of research outputs deposited in IRs, and should be of particular interest for a range of stakeholders, including open access and open science advocates, research agencies, library practitioners, repository developers, and website administrators.
Number of records and visits per document type. Source: 10.1007/s11192-024-05175-0 Source: Based on the IRs’ Dublin Core metadata and created with Scimago Graphica (https://www.graphica.app). Records taken from a sample of three months: October, November, and December 2023. For each record, all visits from the three months are aggregated. Visits from Ubersuggest (Spain/Spanish filter used)
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
