See journal quality on Google Scholar, and turn a search into a research project.
Quartile badges, SJR metrics and open-access flags on every result — then save papers into projects and export BibTeX. Works offline. No account. No tracking.
Packaged for Chrome, Edge and Firefox, and waiting on review — each store takes its own time, usually a few days to a couple of weeks. This page will say Install the moment it can.
The extension is real, and so are the numbers. Every quartile and impact score in the screenshots below was looked up from the actual ranking data the extension ships with. The papers shown are invented — a reading list is personal — but the journals they sit in are real, and so are their ranks.
⭐ Star this repo · 👁 Watch for releases
Watching with Releases only sends you one notification on launch day and nothing else. Starring is what makes the store listings surface for other researchers — it genuinely helps.
Source code follows shortly after launch, under the GPL. This repository is the documentation, support and issue tracker.
LitRank is a free browser extension that adds journal quality information to Google Scholar search results and lets you organise papers into research projects.
Every result gets a badge showing its SJR quartile (Q1–Q4), the journal's SJR score, open-access status, country of publication, and citations per year. You can then filter the page by quartile, document type, citation count or PDF availability — and save anything worth keeping into a named project with BibTeX, CSV and PDF export.
Everything it needs ships inside the extension, so nothing about what you read is ever sent anywhere.
Every result carries its quartile, SJR score and citation rate. The bar above the page filters by quartile, document type, citation count and open access — and the bookmark beside each title saves it to a project.
On an author profile, the same badges appear per publication, plus a distribution of the loaded publications across quartiles and their median SJR. One square per paper — so you are counting, not estimating.
Each project has its own icon, colour and description, and shows at a glance how many papers it holds, how they are distributed across quartiles, and their median SJR. A paper can belong to several projects at once.
Quartile mix, median SJR, a publication-year histogram and the venues you are actually citing — then export the whole project as BibTeX, CSV or JSON, fetch missing metadata from Crossref, or sync it to a folder.
The interface in every shot is the real extension. The papers and authors are invented — a reading list is personal, and the journals they sit in are real, so the quartiles and SJR figures shown are the genuine values LitRank looks up for those venues.
- Quartile badge — Q1, Q2, Q3 or Q4
- SJR score and h-index, with the full subject-category breakdown on hover
- Open access and DOAJ indicators
- Country of publication, as a flag
- Citations per year, because a 2004 paper with 400 citations is not outperforming a 2023 paper with 90
- Document type — journal article, conference paper, book chapter, preprint, thesis or report
| Filter | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Quartile | Show only Q1 and Q2 work |
| Minimum citations | Scholar sorts by citations but cannot filter by them |
| Document type | Exclude preprints, or show only journal articles |
| Open access only | Skip anything you cannot read |
| PDF available | Only results with a direct PDF link |
| Hide already-saved | On a second pass, see only what you have not triaged |
| Sort by journal impact or citations | Reorder without losing Scholar's own order |
- Save any result into a named project with its own icon, colour and description
- One paper can belong to several projects — no duplicates, no split metadata
- Per-project quartile distribution, median SJR, publication-year histogram and top venues
- Export BibTeX, CSV or JSON
- Fetch full metadata from Crossref to fill in volume, issue and pages
- Sync to a folder on your computer, or batch-download available PDFs
Google Scholar search results, author profiles, and Scholar Labs — plus 30+ country domains.
Google Scholar prints a venue name beside every result. LitRank resolves that name — abbreviated, truncated or acronymised as Scholar leaves it — against ranking data carried inside the extension, and draws the badge. No lookup leaves your machine.
The matching is deliberately conservative, and the rule behind it is worth stating plainly:
If more than one journal could fit, LitRank shows nothing rather than guessing.
An Unranked badge means the venue was not matched — never that it scored badly. A tool that quietly guesses is worse than one that admits the gap, because you cannot tell the two apart from the outside.
LitRank sends nothing as you browse.
- The entire ranking dataset is bundled in the extension and read locally
- Saved papers live in your browser's local storage — no server, no account
- No analytics, no telemetry, no tracking of any kind
- The only outbound request is to Crossref, and only when you press Fetch metadata
Full policy: PRIVACY.md
No. LitRank shows SJR (Scimago Journal Rank), which is a different metric on a different scale from a different provider. Journal Impact Factor is a Clarivate metric published in Journal Citation Reports, and its data cannot be redistributed in a free extension. Quartiles shown here are SJR quartiles.
Because the venue was not matched with confidence — not because it scored badly. The usual causes are that the venue is not a journal at all (preprints, theses and books carry no quartile), or that Scholar truncated the name past the point where it is still unique. The badge tells you which.
Because quartiles are assigned to journals, not to proceedings — so LitRank shows a conference's SJR score and h-index instead of inventing a rank for it.
Yes. Profile pages get the same badges, plus a quality summary of the author's loaded publications — how many are Q1, the median SJR, and the distribution across quartiles.
No. The ranking data is prepared once per page, off the critical path, and every lookup after that is instant.
No. Everything is stored locally in your browser. You can export it to a folder on your computer at any time, but nothing leaves your machine unless you ask it to.
Yes — export BibTeX from any project and import it. Records include a DOI wherever one could be recovered, so your reference manager can complete anything Scholar did not show.
No. LitRank is an independent extension. Google Scholar is a trademark of Google LLC.
- Found a bug or have a request? Open an issue
- Questions? Start a discussion
The source is not public yet, so there is nothing to fork today — but the work is not closed off either.
If you would like to contribute, open an issue and say what you would like to work on. We will get in touch and take it from there. That applies to code, but just as much to the things that are easy to overlook:
| You can help with | What that looks like |
|---|---|
| Venue matching | Tell us about a journal that shows Unranked when it should not. Paste the venue exactly as Google Scholar prints it — that string is what the matcher has to work with. |
| A wrong badge | Far more serious than a missing one. LitRank is built to show nothing rather than guess, so a wrong quartile is a bug worth reporting immediately. |
| Translation | The interface is English-only today. |
| Accessibility | Screen-reader behaviour, keyboard navigation, contrast. |
| A feature you keep wishing for | Especially if you can describe the moment in your own reading where you wanted it. |
Issues that describe a real workflow are more useful than a patch that arrives with no context, so do not hold back because you do not write JavaScript.
⭐ Star the repository, and share it with someone whose reading list is a mess. That is not a formality — the plan is to open-source LitRank under the GPL, and visible interest is what makes it worth maintaining in the open. A link passed to a lab group does more for this project than anything else on this page.
LitRank is free, and stays free — no paid tier, no upsell, no adverts, and nothing about your reading is ever sent anywhere. There is no revenue behind it.
Become a sponsor → — one-off or monthly, at whatever level makes sense for you or your institution. It goes to maintenance and to the yearly ranking-data rebuild.
Sponsorship buys no influence over what LitRank shows. Rankings are reported as they are; no journal, publisher or institution can pay to change a badge, and any offer to do so will be declined and made public.
LitRank stands on work that other people gave away. Named here with thanks:
- Scimago Lab — Scimago Journal Rank
- OpenAlex — OurResearch
- Crossref
- flag-icons — Panayiotis Lipiridis
Full licence terms for everything bundled with the extension are in the NOTICE file shipped inside it.
The documentation in this repository is licensed CC BY 4.0.
The LitRank extension source is not yet public. It will be released under the GNU General Public License v3.0.
Bundled third-party data keeps its own licence and is not covered by that grant — the terms travel with the extension in its NOTICE file. Some of it is non-commercial. LitRank is free and will remain free.
A product of Matily.org