Investigations for scholarly publishers whose coverage fell after a migration, a redesign or an attack. Written findings, a stated confidence level, fixes that never break a DOI. No guarantee of recovery: indexes decide that, we find out why.
Or start small: run the free 12-point check on one article.
Three reasons publishers write to us
What you get: the cause, the evidence and a DOI-safe plan.
Request a diagnosisWhat you get: a readiness report with the gaps in order, before the reviewers find them.
Ask for a readiness reviewWhat you get: a preventive audit with the risks in order and DOI-safe fixes, while coverage is still intact.
Ask for a preventive auditWhat you get, when, and what it costs
The problem with ordinary SEO help
Most indexing services are built to launch a new journal. That is a different problem from a publisher who had coverage and lost it — after a migration, a redesign, or an attack.
Recovery is an investigation, not a checklist. It means reading crawl logs, backlink history, and metadata against each other until the cause is proven — then fixing it without breaking a single DOI. This works the same whether your articles live in WordPress, Joomla, OJS, hand-built HTML, or a custom stack.
Selected case files, anonymized
Search engines were crawling ghost URLs left by the old platform instead of the articles. Mapped every crawlable path, redirected ~75,000 legacy URLs, cleaned the duplicate layers in staged cycles — every DOI target protected throughout.
A sudden flood of low-quality referring domains raised the question every publisher fears. Classified the profile against defined toxicity criteria, isolated the attack cohort, and filed a disavow with documented reasoning behind every entry.
301s resolved, yet Scholar coverage fell — because citation_* tags diverged between HTML and PDF during the move. Restored metadata parity, re-established full-text crawlability, tracked recovery against a dated baseline.
The method
Every case runs the same five phases — an evidence chain, not a guess.
Fix the exact date coverage dropped and everything that changed around it — migration, redesign, plugin, server move. Chain of custody starts here.
Crawl logs, Search Console, backlink history, a dated Google Scholar baseline, metadata across HTML and PDF. Nothing taken on faith.
Cross-reference the sources: attack vs update, shadow URLs vs metadata. The goal is causation, not correlation.
A written report with the diagnosis, the evidence behind it, and a stated confidence level. This is the deliverable.
DOI-safe fixes applied through staging, then monitoring so the same failure can't quietly return.
Types of investigation
Six kinds of case. Most publishers arrive with one and discover they have another.
Why a collection disappeared from Google Scholar, Scopus, or Search — and how to bring it back. OJS-specific guide
Distinguish a real attack from an algorithm update with evidence, then contain it.
What a platform move actually broke — redirects, canonicals, metadata — and how to reverse the damage.
Detect AI-fabricated and hallucinated references before they reach publication.
Identify scrapers, prove how duplicate content cannibalizes the original, and remove it.
Whether ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity cite your journal when researchers ask what to read — measured, with a plan.
Who investigates
Myroslav O · LinkedIn
Myroslav is a technical SEO specialist focused on scholarly publishing. He leads SEO at an open-access publisher and investigates why journals lose, or never gain, coverage in Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science.
His work combines crawl and metadata forensics with a researcher's understanding of how journals are evaluated and indexed: what the databases actually check, where platforms and metadata break, and how to document the cause. Findings are delivered as written reports with stated confidence, not guesses.
Myroslav holds degrees in Law (with honors) and Organization Management, and completed postgraduate studies. Scholar Forensics is his independent practice for journals and publishers facing indexation problems.
Independence. Scholar Forensics is run by the same person as JournalFees. JournalFees data and rankings are not for sale and are not affected by Scholar Forensics clients.
Disclosure. Scholar Forensics is an independent one-person practice; I disclose any relationship with a client's publisher or competitor before accepting a case.
Questions publishers ask first
Standards the findings are measured against
Every finding is checked against the sources that actually govern indexing — not opinion.
The technical rules a journal site must meet to be crawled and indexed. The baseline for every deindexation post-mortem.
Publisher-side policy: version grouping, primary-version selection, and how to request inclusion.
The Public Knowledge Project’s own troubleshooting reference for metadata and crawl failures.
The open-access indexing standard and Seal criteria that shape discoverability.
The editorial-integrity standards behind citation-fraud analysis.
DOI registration and the metadata a migration must never break.
Start with the symptom
Tell us the drop, the date and the platform. You get a first read (attack, migration or metadata) with evidence, not a guess.
Written findings, confidence level stated, no guarantee of recoveryPrefer email? hello@scholarforensics.com. Or run the free check first.