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This documentation relates to an old, unsupported version of DSpace, version 1.7.x. Looking for another version? See all documentation.

As of January 2014, the DSpace 1.7.x platform is no longer supported. We recommend upgrading to a more recent version of DSpace.

Google Scholar, in crawling sites, prefers a meta-tag schema of its own devising.  This schema contains names which are all prefixed by the string "citation_", and provide various metadata about the article/item being indexed.  

As of DSpace 1.7, there is a mapping facility to connect metadata fields with these citation fields in HTML.  In order to enable this functionality, the switch needs to be flipped in dspace.cfg:

 google-metadata.enable = true


Once the feature is enabled, the mapping is configured by a separate configuration file located here:

 ${dspace.dir}/config/google-metadata.properties


This file contains name/value pairs linking meta-tags with DSpace metadata fields.  E.g…

 google.citation_title = dc.title
 google.citation_publisher = dc.publisher
 google.citation_authors = dc.author | dc.contributor.author | dc.creator


There is further documentation in this configuration file explaining proper syntax in specifying which metadata fields to use.  If a value is omitted for a meta-tag field, the meta-tag is simply not included in the HTML output.

The values for each item are interpolated when the item is viewed, and the appropriate meta-tags are included in the HTML head tag, on both the Brief Item Display and the Full Item Display.  This is implemented in the XMLUI and JSPUI.

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