Google Scholar released their own official Chrome extension this week. It is very well designed as would be expected from google, and has a core functionality similar to Lazy Scholar. I would highly recommend it if you want to quickly check Google Scholar for full text availability. It also uses (itself) to scrape the link to your library as Lazy Scholar does.
Let’s compare the features:
|
Google Scholar button |
Lazy Scholar |
|
| Automatically checks for a full text on page load | No (must use button click, sometimes necessary to highlight article title first) | Yes |
| Pulls citation info | Yes | Yes |
| Checks if full text indexed on Google Scholar | Yes | Yes |
| Provides library link if set up through Google Scholar | Yes | Yes |
| Provides quick citation link | Yes | Yes |
| Provides citation count | Yes | Yes (plus Altmetric.com count) |
| Related articles link | Yes | No |
| Quick search of Google Scholar | Yes (after button press) | Yes (after typing “ls” + space or tab in the address bar). Also type “ls pm” to quickly query pubmed. |
| Can EZproxify URLs | No | Yes |
| Checks for author email | No | Yes |
| Checks for a journal Impact Factor | No | Yes |
| Checks PubMed Commons & PubPeer for comments | No | Yes |
| Quick share buttons | No | Yes |
| Checks Beall’s list of predatory journals | No | Yes |
| Good design | Yes | No (work in progress! 🙂 ) |
| Supports many languages | Yes | No (on the long to-do list) |
The major advantage of Lazy Scholar is that I have trained it over the last 2 years to recognize scientific papers to be able to automatically query them when opened and display the results. This allows for a completely passive experience- the information comes to you without any extra work. You can however turn this off in the settings and use the extension button, which does basically what the new Google Scholar Button does wrapped in an uglier design. It will be interesting to see if any future development occurs of the Google Scholar Button, and cheers to google for making scholarly life easier.
