Measuring Metadata Impacts: Books Discoverability in Google Scholar - The Scholarly Kitchen

"The scholarly publishing community talks a LOT about metadata and the need for high-quality, interoperable, and machine-readable descriptors of the content we disseminate. However, as we’ve reflected on previously in the Kitchen, despite well-established information standards (e.g., persistent identifiers), our industry lacks a shared framework to measure the value and impact of the metadata we produce. In 2021, we embarked on a Crossref-sponsored study designed to measure how metadata impacts end-user experiences and contributes to the successful discovery of academic and research literature via the mainstream web. Specifically, we set out to learn if scholarly books with DOIs (and associated metadata) were more easily found in Google Scholar than those without DOIs. Initial results indicated that DOIs have an indirect influence on the discoverability of scholarly books in Google Scholar — however, we found no direct linkage between book DOIs and the quality of Google Scholar indexing or users’ ability to access the full text via search-result links. Although Google Scholar claims to not use DOI metadata in its search index, the results of our mixed-methods study of 100+ books (from 20 publishers) demonstrate that books with DOIs are generally more discoverable than those without DOIs...."