How we identified UCSF’s hottest COVID-19 researchers using the free Google Search Console

Anirvan Chatterjee

Keywords: SEO, analytics, marketing, search engines

Abstract:

When COVID-19 hit, journalists and bloggers around the world started referencing the work of health researchers from the University of California, San Francisco. But which ones?

The team behind UCSF Profiles (https://profiles.ucsf.edu/) came up with a simple method to identify health researchers getting public buzz using Search Console, the free dashboard for web publishers. Unlike standard web analytics, these process worked even in cases where a Google user never actually clicked through to our website.

This talk will describe how Google Search Console works, the methods we used, and what we discovered—and how users of VIVO, Profiles, and other research networking platforms can use this tool to answer key questions that internal analytics can't answer.

[UCSF Profiles is managed by the UCSF Clinical and Translational Science Institute, part of the Clinical and Translational Science Award program funded by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (Grant Number UL1 TR000004) at the National Institutes of Health.]