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Martin Paul Eve

Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck, University of London

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Google Scholar will count a blog post as an article if it's cited: a preservation suggestion

When checking out my Google Scholar profile today, I noticed that, if a blog post is cited, it will be counted as an article by Google Scholar. This is interesting for several perhaps conflicting reasons:

  1. These items are (often) not digitally preserved and have unstable URLs
  2. These items are not peer reviewed (does this matter? probably not)
  3. These items are not "amplified" by traditional publishers
  4. These items are not locatable through traditional library discoverability channels
  5. These items are not deposited in institutional repositories (and eprints has no "blog post" option) [this would aid with point #1 if it did]

These are just observations, not criticisms and certainly not meant to start another meta discussion. I was just intrigued that Google just went and counted it. If the preservation options were sorted, this would be an extremely interesting development...

However, a little further digging reveals that I'm not the only one thinking about this. C. Titus Brown wrote a python script to use the FigShare API to deposit a blog post on their site, to assign it a DOI (which is not to do with citeability) and to get it safely preserved in the CLOCKSS archive.

Edit:
Here's a proposed mock-up of how this could work (if you felt like translating posts into JATS XML):

Cite this article
Please include the DOI in your citation: http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.942283
You can view this post's XML with lens.