11 Free Chrome/Firefox Extensions That Make Research Easier.
While researching anything, we tend to heavily rely on our browser. To make this process more efficient, quite a few “plugins” have been created over the years. Every major browser has hundreds, if not thousands of such plugins/extensions/add-ons. Like any infinite list of things, it’s often overwhelming to find helpful ones.
For my work, I read a lot of articles and skim through many web pages, blogs, you name it. In the process, I need to store this information somewhere. Either to write a research paper, or a blog like this one, or just for my knowledge. The following plugins have made my life a lot easier and so I thought I would share them with you.
If any of these plugins make no sense to you, ignore them. You probably don’t need them as of now. But you might later on!
Disclaimer - I am not sponsored by or affiliated with any of the programs I mention. They are shared purely because I find them useful.
A Note About Browsers
I know I only mention Chrome and Firefox. Anywhere I mention Chrome, you can safely assume that Microsoft Edge, Brave, Opera, and Vivaldi also work. The same links should work directly!
Collecting Information
I like taking notes, and my tool of choice here is the Markdown (another format like txt) notes app Obsidian. Of course, you can use anything you want. There are endless note applications, so everyone has their preference. These two plugins have been invaluable in collecting information across pages.
- Roam Highlighter This little plugin is absolutely beautiful. You can call it with a shortcut and highlight across the whole page! It strips out useless formatting and converts them to Markdown. If you use Roam/Obsidian/any other markdown editor, it even auto-converts the links and converts the highlighted text to markdown.
- MarkDownload Sometimes you want large amounts of text from a webpage you come across. This plugin gets all the text/links/images etc from the page you are on and converts it into a format you can easily copy and paste from. Extremely handy isn’t it?
Writing Research Papers/Articles
A large chunk of my work involves writing technical articles and research papers. It’s a lot of work, and I need shortcuts to help me out in the process. These plugin-ins have saved me a lot of headaches in the long run.
- TamperMonkey: Bibtex copy This plugin is a bit of a special case. Instead of providing specific functionality, it enables users to write their scripts to modify any webpage in real-time. You can do anything from Getting direct links, endlessly loading Google search results to modifying Twitter. While writing papers, citing them is a huge headache. Since I write my reports in LaTEX, I need the “BibTex” version from Google Scholar which is a pain. This little plugin automatically does that with a single click. You can find out how to install it here.
- SLext If you write your documents in LaTEX, chances are you use Overleaf to do so. It is a website that makes it extremely easy to write any kind of professional document using LaTEX. But it does have limitations, and the biggest bummer for me is the lack of tabs. This plugin adds just that, and it saves me so much trouble.
- Sci-Hub scholar I firmly believe that research should not be paywalled. (Even this article is available for free on my blog without the fancy stuff). If you are affiliated with a university or company, you might have access to as many papers as you want. But as an independent researcher? Well. Happy crying. This plugin adds links to the website Sci-Hub directly in Google Scholar which lets you access a lot of paywalled research directly. (I would link it but I don’t want to get demonetized).
- Unpaywall Similar to the previous one, this also lets you access paywalled articles by finding other un-paywalled versions of them from elsewhere on the web.
- Zotero/Mendeley Connector For anyone who reads a lot of research papers, managing them is probably the biggest headache. Mendeley and Zotero are probably the most popular library managers. While browsing the web, you might want to directly save any research paper you like to your computer. This plugin lets you do that with a single click. Both the programs have this installed by default, you just need to enable them from the application itself - Zotero, Mendeley.
Medium
I admit most of you probably don’t write articles yourself. But if you do, I find these two plugins useful for extending what is possible here on Medium.
- Code medium Adding proper code snippets is honestly such a pain on Medium. Maybe in time, this will be fixed, but for now, this plugin lets you directly create gists on Github. It looks pretty and just works. I write technical articles and trust me, it has saved me hours.
- TOC Medium
If you have noticed, not every article has a clickable table of contexts like this one. If you were to do it manually, you might need to look at the HTML source code, and do a lot of drama. Instead, this plugin just lets you add the TOC just as you would any other element. It does not auto-update though, so I would recommend leaving it for after you are done with your article.
It is also sadly not available for Firefox.
- Chrome , Firefox(Not there)
Honorable Mentions
Some of these are not exactly extensions, but I think they deserve to be mentioned anyway.
- My Text Cleanup Script Although many of the applications I mentioned above let you copy the text in chunks, they don’t offer any advanced formatting options. (Eg: cleaning up Wikipedia links, making lists, formatting paragraphs, etc.) Now, there are a million ways to do this. But my favorite is this script that I wrote a while back. It uses Python and lets you do whatever you want to the text in your clipboard. After processing is complete, it pastes it back to your clipboard. This is not for everyone. But if you are interested, I’ll be happy to explain how it works. Just ask!
- Text Workflow This application is not free. (Sorry!) I have a Mac, and this app lets you do whatever my script above does but with a UI. If you want something free, use the previously mentioned script. I’m sure there are other alternatives for Linux and Windows. I either use vim or my script. I have not used Windows in a long time and so I can’t recommend anything.
- Adblocker An adblocker is essential to save your sanity. (Although turning it off on websites you want to support is good!) These are my favorites.
- I don’t care about cookies As the name suggests, this auto accepts only essential cookies from the prompt. It saves you that extra click and removes the banner that covers the entire bottom of web pages.
Fin
This article is in the hopes that it will help someone out. Maybe have the help that I did not. I do not know who it will reach. But to whoever it does, best of luck :)
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