---
layout: post
status: publish
published: true
title: ! 'Google Scholar will count a blog post as an article if it''s cited: a preservation
  suggestion'

wordpress_id: 3025
wordpress_url: https://www.martineve.com/?p=3025
date: !binary |-
  MjAxNC0wMi0yMiAwNjo0NDoxNyArMDEwMA==
date_gmt: !binary |-
  MjAxNC0wMi0yMiAwNjo0NDoxNyArMDEwMA==
categories:
- Open Access
- Academia
tags:
- OA
comments: []
---
<p>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:</p>
<div style="clear: both;"></div>
<ol>
<li>These items are (often) not digitally preserved and have unstable URLs</li>
<li>These items are not peer reviewed (does this matter? probably not)</li>
<li>These items are not "amplified" by traditional publishers</li>
<li>These items are not locatable through traditional library discoverability channels</li>
<li>These items are not deposited in institutional repositories (and eprints has no "blog post" option) [this would aid with point #1 if it did]</li>
</ol>
<p>These are just observations, not criticisms and certainly not meant to start <a href="https://www.martineve.com/2011/09/27/academia-edtech-blogging-and-twitter-enough-with-the-meta-already/">another meta discussion</a>. I was just intrigued that Google just went and counted it. If the preservation options were sorted, this would be an extremely interesting development...</p>
<p>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 <a href="http://ivory.idyll.org/blog/posting-blog-entries-to-figshare.html">deposit a blog post</a> on their site, to assign it a DOI (<a href="http://carlboettiger.info/2013/06/03/DOI-citable.html#comment-919771037">which is not to do with citeability</a>) and to get it <a href="https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A3=ind1204&amp;L=LIS-SERIALS&amp;E=quoted-printable&amp;P=112364&amp;B=--bcaec54c52b2580cc104bd854894&amp;T=text%2Fhtml;%20charset=windows-1252&amp;pending=">safely preserved in the CLOCKSS archive</a>.</p>
<p><b>Edit:</b><br />
Here's a proposed mock-up of how this could work (if you felt like translating posts into JATS XML):</p>
<p><b>Cite this article</b><br />
Please include the DOI in your citation: <a href="http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.942283">http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.942283</a><br />
You can <a href="https://www.martineve.com/lens-martineve/index.html?url=https://www.martineve.com/lens-martineve/data/2014-02-22.xml">view this post's XML with lens</a>.</p>