Scholar Forensics

Free tool  ·  read-only, one article

Free journal check: 12 technical points for one article.

Paste the address of one article page. The check reads public files only and reports what a scholarly crawler would see, with evidence and a date. It does not tell you whether an index lists the article: only the index can.

We fetch the public page and a few related public files. The result, with the address, is kept for 24 hours. See privacy.

What is checked

  1. Reachable, with a short redirect chain

    The page answers HTTP 200 and does not bounce through more than two redirects.

  2. Not blocked from crawling

    No noindex in the page or headers, and robots.txt does not block Googlebot from this path.

  3. One canonical URL

    A canonical link exists and points to this page.

  4. citation_title present

    The tag Google Scholar reads first.

  5. citation_author present

    At least one author tag.

  6. Publication date present

    citation_publication_date in YYYY/MM/DD form.

  7. Journal title and ISSN present

    citation_journal_title and citation_issn.

  8. PDF reachable without login

    citation_pdf_url answers 200 and returns a real PDF, not a login page or a viewer.

  9. DOI resolves to this site

    The DOI in citation_doi leads back to the same host.

  10. Article listed in a sitemap

    The URL appears in a sitemap named in robots.txt or at /sitemap.xml.

  11. Crossref record found, title matches

    The DOI exists in Crossref and the title agrees with the page.

  12. Crossref record: references, ORCID, licence

    Whether references, ORCID iDs and a licence were deposited.

What this check is not

If several points fail, or the results do not explain a drop in coverage, ask for a diagnosis.