Lazy Scholar 1.1 for Chrome

In March, I updated Lazy Scholar for Chrome to version 1.0, a complete rewrite from the previous version. Today’s update to 1.1 makes substantial improvements to finding free full texts and citations. Here is a summary of what is new in the 1.x versions from previous.

Full text Finding

Lazy Scholar now searches multiple places (including doai.io, with their generous permission, PubMed Central, and Europe PMC along with Google Scholar) for free full texts and shows you all options (an update from March’s 1.0 release). It also verifies PDFs, so if the PDF icon is showing like in the example below, you can be certain it is a PDF that you can access. The green icons are non-PDF full texts that Lazy Scholar is highly confident are 100% free, whereas the yellow icon means that Lazy Scholar is moderately confident that it is a free full text. EZproxy and library links also display in this section as quick links if no free full text is available.

Scholarly link detection on non-scholarly websites

Lazy Scholar will now scan non-scholarly websites to locate scholarly links and display them in an infobar. Hovering over the “Hover to locate” text will scroll to the link on the page and highlight it in yellow, and clicking the link in the infobar will search for full texts, paper details and metrics. You can turn this off in Options.

Citations

The citation feature is substantially improved with over 900 citation styles. You may quickly change citation styles by clicking the “Cite” header to initiate a drop-down. A “powerpoint” style option is also available to generate short citations that you can copy/paste into Powerpoint slides.

More Paper Details

Lazy Scholar now puts additional paper details in a drop-down under the “Searched” section. Quickly follow the DOI or PubMed links, or get the authors email address or other info. If a ClinicalTrials.gov listing is found, a link to there is also displayed.

Related Papers

A drop-down also exists for “Related Papers”. These are duplicated from PubMed.

Sharing Links

New sharing links are available and customizable from a drop-down with an easy drag/drop interface.

Syncing

If you are signed into a Google account and allow your extensions to sync, your Lazy Scholar settings will now be duplicated to other instances.

“Nuclear blocking”

Lazy Scholar has options to block websites that it doesn’t recognize as scholarly for 1 hour to allow distraction free working (Right click the icon for this option). You can choose in Options a “nuclear” blocking option to make it impossible* to cancel this until the time is up.

*almost. I won’t tell you how though.

Theme & Other

The complete rewrite of Lazy Scholar brought about a new theme and improved loading of items so that they load when they are individually found instead of waiting until they are all found. This substantially reduces loading speed and allows for searching of more services.

Many other small tweaks and improvements have been made to optimize efficiency. For example, the extension now unloads scripts when not in use to free memory usage. The file size of the extension has been greatly reduced as well.

Please give me feedback if Lazy Scholar improves your workflow.

 

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Firefox Update

Firefox is currently updating their extension system to load Chrome extensions with little to no modifications. Therefore, the new version of Lazy Scholar will be updated once this is live and has undergone testing. For updates on this progress, please subscribe to the Lazy Scholar beta testing community on Google+.