Google Scholar Metadata Mappings

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]/config/crosswalks/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.