Find Article PDFs easily with Lazy Scholar

Looking to speed up your research? The Lazy Scholar extension for Google Chrome is now even more helpful.

I’ve mentioned Lazy Scholar before, but it’s worth mentioning again as it’s had an update. It’s an extension for Google Chrome that looks for PDFs of articles when you’re browsing abstracts. It also has some other nifty features.

You can search for papers by typing scholar.google.com into your address bar, then your search. With Lazy Scholar you can shorten this by typing ls search term which works as a direct search on Google Scholar for whatever you’re searching for.

The recent updates are easy paper sharing links and something else that looks useful: Lazy Scholar now checks Beall’s list of Predatory Journals. These are open access journals that will accept more or less anything, so long as you hand over the money. I have seen one or two good authors publish papers in predatory journals, but Lazy Scholar now adds a warning to let you know that what you’re looking at is a questionable journal.

If you use Chrome during your research then it’s well worth downloading Lazy Scholar from the Chrome Web Store (for free).