What is the Google Scholar Subscriber Links program?

All Academic customers with ScienceDirect subscriptions are included in this program, no matter how large or small their content holdings, except those who have opted-out. We intend to open up the program to Government, Corporate (i.e. public and private companies) and Health Science customers in 2020, and will be contacting customers ahead of time to give them the choice to participate in the program or not.

Participating in the Google Scholar Subscriber Links program means that your on-campus users immediately see when they have full-text access to articles in Google Scholar search results via ‘Subscriber Links’ (more information below). This benefits your users by providing them with a more precise and convenient searching experience. It supports you by maximizing the visibility and usage of your library’s full-text content collections.

The benefits for ScienceDirect are broadly the same as for your library. We want you to get the most from your ScienceDirect content and from the full range of functionality the platform offers. If that means enabling your patrons to search via Google Scholar, that’s fine—we want to do our utmost to make it possible.

No. Google Scholar’s policies, which can be found here, ensure the application of the holdings information is limited to determining whether users have full-text access to records matching their query. Note that these policies have also been used for Google Scholar's popular Library Links program and have been in place for over 12 years. If for any reason you do not wish us to share your details with Google, please contact your Account Manager and we will exclude you from this program.

No, Subscriber Links does not have any impact on the Library Links that Google Scholar creates for participating libraries. Google Scholar will continue to link to library link resolvers as it always has.

Google Scholar is a search service. It does not provide access to articles. Instead, it links to web sites where the user can access articles. To access desired articles on ScienceDirect, the user would click on the link to ScienceDirect in Google Scholar search results.

Yes.

As yet, this program is limited to journals. We may expand to include books in the future.

There is no change in the ranking of search results.

Google Scholar search results would look like the screenshot below (all results are from ScienceDirect for demonstration purposes only). These are “Subscriber Links”.

If you would like to enable Subscriber Links to ScienceDirect in Google Scholar, please contact us to inform us that you would like to activate Google Scholar Subscriber Links for your institution.

If you change your mind at a later date, please contact us and inform us of your request. We will cease to provide your institution’s holdings from the files we exchange with Google. Per their policy, Google will stop using your holdings data within 30 days.