Skip to content

Google Scholar Indexing

Matt Post edited this page Apr 2, 2019 · 6 revisions

Update April 2019

We believe this issue is now resolved. Please feel free to file an issue if you find more problems.

February 2019

We commonly receive reports of problems with Google Scholar indexing. We share the opinion of many that this is a serious problem. This document summarizes our understanding of the nature of the problem and our plans to address it. This is one of our top priorities for 2019, and we believe we will have it fixed by March of 2019.

Reported problems include:

  • Citations from Anthology papers (both incoming and outgoing) do not appear in the Scholar citation graphs, or count towards Google's author metrics.

  • ACL publications do not trigger alerts that users have set.

  • Papers in the Anthology appear low in search results, often behind sites which are just mirrors.

Discussions with Google suggest that the main problem is that the Anthology is distributed over two sites. The main site, including paper and author information and citation files, are hosted at aclanthology.info, but the linked PDFs are hosted at aclweb.org/anthology. This apparently raises flags in Google Scholar search.

The reason for this bifurcation is that the Anthology runs on a dynamic engine that cannot be hosted at aclweb.org for technical reasons. We are therefore in the midst of a static rewrite of the Anthology. This will allow us to publish the entire site under aclweb.org, removing the problems listed above. We also hope that the static site will be faster than the current one.

Specific issues