Jed Yang::Gooogle Scholar Bookmarklet

Here is a simple Google Scholar bookmarklet.

Google Scholar

Purpose

Remember the good old days when "Scholar" was one of the links in the Google bar? After performing a Google search, one could click on "Scholar" to perform a Google Scholar search with the same keywords. (This functionality is still available for Image search, for instance.) I have personally clicked on that link enough times to notice it once it disappeared after a re-design, and lament their poor choice. But why lament when we could turn grief into creative energy and solve the problem?

Usage

Drag the link above to a bookmarks toolbar. Clicking on it will do wonders. More specifically:
  1. If on the result page of some Google search, the keywords will be lifted out of the search form and used as the search string in Google Scholar;
  2. If on any other page, the Google Advanced Scholar Search page will be launched; and
  3. If the keyword field is set for the bookmark, a search can be directly performed (see below).
Indeed, we can enhance this by using the keyword search feature for Firefox. Set the "keyword" field to, say, gs. Then typing gs vertex-pancyclicity of hypertournaments in the address bar should perform a Google Scholar search that would return my undergrad research paper.

If you are not using Firefox and the keyword feature is messing the bookmarklet up, here is a version without it:

Google Scholar (without keyword search feature)

History

I first wrote this without lifting the string out of the form, but rather, extracting it from the URL. This has the side effect that when the form and the URL are different, the wrong one (most likely we want the one from the form, not in the URL) would be used. I saw Scholarfy and decided to incorporate the form-lifting code into mine. If you want to stay on a page when it is not a search page (feature 1 only), use Johan's bookmarklet instead.

Aftermath

Yes, the code is very simple. Yes, this page is very long. And yes, I spent more time writing this page than making the bookmarklet proper.