Contribute to the DSpace Development Fund

The newly established DSpace Development Fund supports the development of new features prioritized by DSpace Governance. For a list of planned features see the fund wiki page.

While DSpace 7.0 supports Google Scholar meta  tags, they are no longer configurable & are currently hardcoded into the User Interface codebase.  Configurability may be coming back in a later 7.x release (based on user feedback), see https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/1198

Google Scholar, in crawling sites, prefers Highwire Press tags.  This schema contains names which are all prefixed by the string "citation_", and provide various metadata about the article/item being indexed.  

In DSpace, 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_author = 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 in the UI.

Note: In DSpace 5, the field google.citation_authors was changed to google.citation_author.


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