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As the editor of a small but growing university journal, I’m facing a visibility challenge and would love some advice.

Our journal has always published articles as compiled PDFs by issue—like chapters in a book. We currently use ISBN rather than ISSN. While this maintains our traditional format, it’s created problems: since our first issue in 2019 (five issues total, 31 articles), only 14 articles appear indexed in Google Scholar. Entire issues seem to be missing.

I’m considering a hybrid approach: keeping the original compiled PDFs for each issue while also uploading individual article PDFs alongside them. For example, Vol. 1 No. 1 would contain both the complete issue PDF and separate files for each article.

I’d particularly appreciate insights on:

  • Whether this dual-format strategy might improve indexing without compromising our issue-based identity
  • If we should pursue ISSN registration in addition to our current ISBN
  • Whether we should assign DOIs to individual articles after separating them (we currently don’t have DOIs at all)
  • Any potential drawbacks we should consider

Our journal operates under UNC, though I haven’t yet confirmed whether they have CrossRef/DataCite membership. My main concern is ensuring our authors’ work gets proper visibility—both past publications and future submissions deserve to be found and cited.

For those who’ve navigated similar challenges: what would you recommend for a journal in our position?

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  • re:"We currently use ISBN rather than ISSN": Attributing ISBN to journal issues does not mean you can't have an ISSN for your journal, these are distinct systems with different purposes. However, it's up to your ISSN national center to decide whether your journal meets the requirements to get an ISSN, you have to submit a request for your journal. Commented Mar 28 at 22:04
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    As for DOIs, it is not something necessary to be cited (style guides make provisions for citing articles that don't have DOIs), but it certainly makes things much easier for people who want to cite articles from your journal, as DOIs generally integrate very well with reference manager software. Commented Mar 28 at 22:21
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    @AmirrezaHashemi, people more knowledgeable and experienced than me have already touched on the topic of DOIs. But since you are asking, I can, probably, add from a user perspective that your "issue-based identity" might not be the right choice. I, personally, have never seen journals like that and would be confused when I encounter one and, probably, would skip it. Apart from that, I am thinking if the search engines give preference to the individual papers over full journals. To sum up, as a user, I would prefer separate papers. Also, events like Cassini webinars can help boost visibility. Commented Mar 28 at 23:15
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    Some other advice might also be specific to your field or subfield. What area is your journal in? Commented Mar 29 at 0:07
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    It's an interdisciplinary journal that accepts original papers spanning natural sciences, humanities, social sciences, and applied sciences. We occasionally run special issues too - for example, we currently have one focusing on AI. @JoshuaZ Commented Mar 29 at 8:36

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good questions.

It's sometimes an enigma what Google Scholar indexes or not. The best resource around this is their own guidance for webmasters. As far as I understand it, having separate PDFs for each article is probably going to improve the chances of Scholar indexing your articles.

Having an ISSN is considered best practice for serial publications like journals and an ISSN can be applied retroactively to past issues which may or may not have been issued separately with ISBNs.

Speaking from my place as a Crossref employee: DOIs are always good to have but it's certainly possible to cite an article without one (people were doing this for hundreds of years before DOIs were developed in 2000). DOIs and their associated metadata records will, however, help readers link to your articles and maintain persistent access to them in the long term. Our recommendation is to assign DOIs at the article level as this is the level at which scholars are most likely to cite works (rather than, say, at the issue level...entire issues are cited much less frequently than individual papers within them). DOIs and rich metadata such as ORCID iDs, author affiliations/ROR IDs, references, and funding data will also improve tracking of research outputs by author, by institution, and by funding body.

University of North Carolina Press is a member of Crossref; if you were interested in collaborating with them to register DOIs I would encourage you to reach out to their Digital Initiatives team. It would also be possible for you to join Crossref separately to register and manage your own DOIs though this would also mean paying your own annual membership fee.

I hope this is useful!

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    +1. The Google Scholar documentation you're pointing to contains considerably useful information for indexing a journal. Commented Mar 28 at 22:36
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    Sorry to bother you again, but since you work at Crossref, I'd really value your insight. As you mentioned, our university is a Crossref member, but if the library won't cover the annual fees/article DOI costs and our journal lacks funding, would using free alternatives like Zenodo (which redirects DOIs to their site, not ours) be reasonable? My only concern is whether this redirect affects citation tracking or indexing for authors. What's your take? Commented Mar 29 at 13:54
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    @AmirrezaHashemi This should be asked as a separate question. You can then link that question in the comments here, if you want a particular person to answer it. Otherwise, the information isn't easily available to future people: it'll languish in obscurity, until someone else asks the question again somewhere else. That's a lot of wasted effort. Commented Mar 29 at 17:31
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    @AmirrezaHashemi - Zenodo's DOIs are registered via our sibling DOI registration agency DataCite, so they aren't cross-compatible with Crossref DOIs. That doesn't mean that researchers can't cite them in articles in Crossref-registered journals, but it does mean that our system can't track those citations. Whether this is right for your needs or not really depends on what you want DOIs for. If you want the flexibility of choosing where your DOIs direct readers then Zenodo may not be the best option. It's also worth looking at journals that use Zenodo this way - are they indexed in GoogSchol? Commented Mar 29 at 23:11
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    Just a late note - I've posted an expanded set of thoughts and consideration on the question of Zenodo DOIs to Crossref's Community Forum in case anyone's interested. Thanks! community.crossref.org/t/… Commented Aug 29 at 20:54

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