Google Scholar is a vital tool for engineering scholars, enabling efficient literature searches and facilitating academic dissemination. Elsevier, as one of the largest publishers of engineering journals, produces essential research that scholars rely on. The pre-proof policy, adopted by Elsevier for certain journals, allows articles to be published online in their accepted draft form before final proofreading and formatting. However, this study empirically demonstrates that the pre-proof publication policy hinders comprehensive indexing by Google Scholar. Articles published under this policy are only partially indexed, often limited to titles and abstracts, while crucial sections such as introductions, methods, results, discussions, conclusions, appendices, and data availability statements remain unsearchable. This problem has persisted for years, resulting in reduced visibility and accessibility of certain Elsevier articles. To improve academic dissemination, both Elsevier and Google Scholar must address this problem by modifying publishing policies or enhancing indexing practices. Additionally, this paper explores strategies that authors can use to mitigate the issue and ensure broader discoverability of their research.

翻译：谷歌学术是工程学者进行高效文献检索和促进学术传播的重要工具。爱思唯尔作为工程期刊最大的出版商之一，产出学者们所依赖的重要研究成果。爱思唯尔为其部分期刊采用的预校样政策，允许文章在最终校对和排版前，以其被接受的草稿形式在线发表。然而，本研究通过实证表明，预校样发表政策阻碍了谷歌学术的全面索引。根据此政策发表的文章仅被部分索引，通常仅限于标题和摘要，而引言、方法、结果、讨论、结论、附录和数据可用性声明等关键部分则无法被检索。此问题已持续多年，导致部分爱思唯尔文章的可见度和可获取性降低。为改善学术传播，爱思唯尔和谷歌学术必须通过修改出版政策或改进索引实践来解决此问题。此外，本文探讨了作者可用来缓解此问题并确保其研究获得更广泛发现的策略。