The AJR homepage: robots.txt and negative effect on search engines.

Abstract

AJR 2014; 203:W563 0361–803X/14/2035–W563 © American Roentgen Ray Society The AJR Homepage: Robots.txt and Negative Effect on Search Engines In this digital age of journals, search engines, such as PubMed and Google, are increasingly important. Although it is often recommended to use reference librarians to perform a thorough literature search, the direct use of electronic search engines is increasing [1–3]. Therefore, electronic search engines have the potential to impact the visibility of journals and subsequently increase or decrease the number of citations a journal or specific article receives. It is easy to search for AJR articles in search engines, such as Google. However, in many search engines, including the Baidu search engine, which is the by far the largest search engine in China, there are absolutely no results for any AJR articles [4]. Also, in search engines such as Microsoft Bing, most of the results will report, “We would like to show you a description here, but the site won’t allow us.” This is due to the robots. txt file on the AJR homepage. This robots.txt file is used to control which search engines are allowed to search the AJR homepage. Currently, it is essentially set up to block all search engines except Google. Notably, journal-specific search engines, such as PubMed, ignore or do not use robots.txt files. Therefore, the AJR homepage is currently searchable only on journal search engines. However, most other large commercial search engines abide by the robots.txt rules. This means that the AJR homepage is not searchable on a significant portion of the world’s search engines [5, 6]. This has the advantage of decreasing the server load and bandwidth that the AJR homepage uses, which can potentially decrease website management costs. However, because of the increasing importance of search engines, it is important for the AJR editorial staff to look into this aspect and reconsider whether they really wish to block all search engines except Google. Michael Yong Park Jae Young Byun Seoul St. Mary’s Hospital, The Catholic University of Korea, Seoul, Korea