Figure 1. The list of self-archived publications on the personal academic website of philosophy scholar Matthew J. Brown. [Retrieved from www.matthewjbrown.net, May 2023].
Similarly, Suze Leitão, a clinician and language scholar at Curtin University, Australia, self-archives her research paper in the website created and self-managed by researchers of the Language and Literacy in Young People Research Group [28]. Accessing the web page by late 2022, papers published between 2019 and 2022 were freely accessible as PDF files. Articles published between 2009 and 2018, though were not self-archived, in agreement to what found by Bjork and Laakso in 2014 for which even authors who self-archive their papers “do so only periodically, and there are strong indications that roughly half of green OA copies in repositories are uploaded a year or more after publishing” [18].
Martin Gilje Jaatun, a senior scientist at Norway’s SINTEF and adjunct professor at University of Stavanger, self-archives his paper on his personal website https://jaatun.no/papers “according to the publisher’s policy” [29], “but for some reason they are invisible to Google” [29].
It is enough, in this respect, to undertake a search engine optimization of the personal academic website [30], to allow search engines to find and index all the publications uploaded online. We remind that by uploading a research article in PDF format, search engines such as Google Scholar can index textual content (written in any language) from PDF files that use various kinds of character encodings (provided they are not password protected or encrypted; as most PDF files (based on LaTex, Microsoft Word, etc.) have a text layer of information that is indexed by search engines).
One of the problems of a personal academic website is the “reputation” (for web crawlers) of the personal domain, which will never be able to match the “reputation” of institutional domains, academic social network sites (such as ResearchGate or Academia.edu), or repositories of scientific papers. As a result, the personal academic site will appear in search results only after plentiful other results. In brief, the “reputation” or “rank” of a website online is basically given by the number of links to the target website (domain) from other websites, and by the number of other domains each linking domain links to.
There are several online tools providing such ranking. One, for instance, is Domain Rating (DR) on a 100-degree (logarithmic) scale [31]. Table 1 shows the Domain Rating value of selected personal academic websites as of May 2023 next to the DR value of the same researcher web page on ResearchGate or Academia.edu. For example, using one of the many tools available (e.g., https://ahrefs.com/website-authority-checker), one can check the “reputation” of the olumuyiwaigbalajobi.com domain is 0.2 on a 100-degree scale. However, for the link https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Olumuyiwa-Igbalajobi, the value is 93, an outcome that directly affects the positioning of search results. For example, searching for one of the scholar’s most popular papers (“Red-and blue-light sensing in the plant pathogen Alternaria alternata depends on phytochrome and the white-collar protein LreA”) by typing its title in a commonly used search engine (Google) includes his personal website in one of the last positions (on page 4 of the research results). On the other hand, the paper reference on ResearchGate is found by the search engine as 4thresult on page 1, showing in this case the advantage to academic social network sites.
However, this is not case when searching (on the same search engine) a research paper of Ananikov and co-workers published in 2022 (““Hidden” Nanoscale Catalysis in Alkyne Hydrogenation with Well-Defined Molecular Pd/NHC Complexes”). Now, the article on the personal academic website (http://ananikovlab.ru) is found as 6th search outcome, on page 1 of the search engine results, whereas the article on ResearchGate is found only on page 2 of the search outcomes returned by the search engine.
In brief, even if no comparison is possible between personal academic websites (domains) and the corresponding web pages of scholars in academic social networks in terms of “authority” or “reputation” as defined by the search engine algorithms (Table 1), owning a personal websites remains clearly advantageous in relation to many aspects of research work.
Table 1 . Domain Rating for selected personal academic websites along with Domain Rating of the same researcher on selected academic social network sitesa