Google Scholar Button vs Lazy Scholar

by | Apr 11, 2015 | Uncategorized | 1 comment

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.