Google Scholar Button for your browser

Looking up a highlighted citation with the Google Scholar button

In April of 2015, Google released a Google Scholar plug-in for an internet browser. After a few months of testing, I think it seems stable and useful for looking up citations without necessarily needing to leave the webpage you're currently looking at or opening a new tab.

If you decide to install the button in your browser, you should be able to highlight text on a page (either a citation in an online bibliography or text from an actual article), click the button and instantly see where the full text might be available open access or via the library. Scholar is far from failsafe when checking our collections, so if it doesn't find it at YSJ, it's always best to double check from the library's website (or with your librarian) whether we may have the item in our collection.

Looking up a highlighted quote the Google Scholar button

You can also type into the button a snippet of text from an article or book you'd like to cite, and then see results of articles where those words appear. This might be useful if you handwrite a quote into a notebook but fail to take the full citation at the time (not that any YSJ scholar would fall prey to such bad habits).


The browser button is available for Chrome and Firefox. Happy searching!