Lean Library

Terrible at highlighting on scientific articles. The highlight either saves in the workspace but not the page so I have to refresh the page for each new one to appear, saves incompletely on the page (incomplete on the page, okay in the workspace, which is unideal when I'm actively reading), or does not highlight at all so I have to refresh the page to save a single highlight (and refresh again to save each new one). I also don't appreciate that it does not ask what subfolder to save the article to upon the first highlight, the way Sciwheel used to. Sciwheel had a great system, I used it for 4 years with no complaints. Somehow Lean Library's acquisition has overcomplicated the extension and made it less functional. I've been hesitant to start over with a new citation manager since I have over a thousand articles saved, so I've been waiting for the initial bugs to be resolved. However, my patience is wearing thin as time goes on and issues remain unaddressed, and I'm increasingly tempted to jump ship on this one. I hope changes come soon.

This may sound unlikely, but the latest version released yesterday breaks things on youtube pages. It took a lot of switching each of my extensions off and on again to identify that Lean was reliably triggering the problem when it was on (and no other extensions did that). The problems include causing the youtube notifications button to flash up the notifications list window only for second of so and then close it, and causing the "..." 3-dot menus on youtube pages to not open at all. The only solution at the moment is to disable the extension.

Like others have said, this is completely unusable and breaks all the nice features Sciwheel had. It also takes over highlighting on all webpages and randomly breaks their alignment, even on sites that have no business being related to references. Also, if there’s no sane way to import PDFs into the library, what is the point of the extension? Super disappointed with this transition—missing out on such basic features, all of which could have been predicted. It’s not rocket science: people want to import PDFs into a reference manager.

Why won't highlighted portions show up when I visit a paper later? I also can't click to remove highlights that do decide to show up. Generally must more frustrating and less intuitive to use than SciWheel. Very disappointed.

Terrible switch from Sciwheel to this. Where is all the functionality? why must I go to the lean library workspace in order to add tags? and why for the life of me I cannot shake the affiliation to the university of derby, even though I'm not affiliated with it in any way, and at no point did I indicate in the program that I have something to do with that particular institution? we're not even located in the same country for crying out loud!

SciWheel extension had such better functionality. For example this extension is 'incompatible' when I open article PDFs and doesn't seem to automatically add the PDF when its open access, whereas this was never a problem with SciWheel. Disappointed in this new version and hope that it can be brought up to par with the previous extension.

I appreciate the desire to rebrand the extension, but how can users be forced to "upgrade" to lean library extension when the replacement lacks the functionality that the sciwheel extension has? When changes like this are made in the future will so little attention be paid to the users of the product? What does open access have to do with whether or not I find the content relevant? Was any user testing done? What are the specific problems? - The popup is insane, the inability to add to the library by right click, the notes and highlight functionality ... A better question is probably, what were the reasons for changing the existing functionality? Why was it changed? What features were added? Were there critical security patches that were necessary? Why is the switchover mandatory? I have been quite happy with sciwheel and had got many others on the product but it is hard to interpret this change as anything other than a change in priorities that bodes ill for the future.

Sciwheel was a much better extension. It was easy to add notes to previous highlights and easy to edit highlights, and there was a mobile app, which I found useful for bus rides. Now, if I don't add a note when I create a highlight, I can't add one later. Often, the when I try clicking on a highlight I have previously made, it won't let me, or I won't be able to delete it. I don't appreciate the "We found an open access version" pop-up, because I am usually already on a version I have access to through my insitutiton. I was just on an article and the extension kept turning on and off.

This went from SciWheel's completely unobtrusive format to the feel of pop-up advertisements. Please allow for access to the legacy version of the extension.

Greetings, I'm not able to get in at all.. It tells me that I am successfully logged in, but it does not get redirected to the library. Spent hours figuring it out and still unsuccessful.

Cannot access it when I need it. Will show up when I dont 'talk to a librarian'. Previous version was 100,000 fold better.

Strange and frustrating bug where this application keeps refreshing my page/switching me back and forth between pdfs. It might be that it interacts badly with Zotero, in which case I know which I'm keeping!

Occasionally uses nearly 100% GPU for lengthy periods. M1 Max, Monterey 12.5

If it worked it would be amazing... but it doesn't. Don't waste your time nor storage space on this extention

On OSX, randomly causes the whole Chrome window to become a blank screen every hour or so -- impossible to work with it turned on.

I want to use it but I can't find my uni library, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, please include more libraries, thank you.

Doesn't work in maybe 80% of the time

I need the extension for Uni, but it makes chrome extermely laggy and unresponsive. And that is on a high spec computer. I have to uninstall the extension everytime I finished using it, in order to use chrome comfortably.

While all my other extensions work fine, Library Access doesn't seem to work anymore, either with Firefox or Chrome browsers. When I click on the icon, nothing happens, it's blank. I am no longer logged in through my university log-ins while I visit a site the university has subscribed to. I don't know what to do...

Should come with a health warning. Breaks links. Pollutes your referencing software. Academics should not use. Clicking the extension gives access but changes the URL in my browser bar. As someone who likes to copy sources by copy and paste, this is a fail. That URL is now useless for anyone outside my institution. Worse, I use a Zotero extension to store and manage references. The modified URLs then get imported into my referencing software. I doubt very much whether they will work in a few years time.

Slows down Google Chrome (Version 88.0.4324.104 (Official Build) (64-bit)) enormously. Cannot recommend.

breaks all the time

Something broken in update - tries to take over google search so that it is unable.

Great premise but causing continuously HUGE CPU usage, making Chrome unbearably slow. Defaulting to whitelisting only known journal sites might help. Developer: try using this on an old or mobile processored computer with more than a few tabs open.

Accessing to uni library resources are good. However, at some point it blocks out your regular internet. Meaning you can't load pages using your browser, at least in chrome. I am using Ubuntu 18.04 with Chrome.

It is a great idea, unfortunately if I activate this extension with Chromium (linux computer), internet stops working on chromium at some point. The solution is either to reinitilize chormium or stop the extension. Quite unfortunately because it took me a long time to find the problem with my internet conection.

I hate that I am forced to use this extension for remote library access. It intermittently slows my internet speeds to unusable levels (with sites that should not go through a proxy, such as Twitter, taking over 60 seconds to load) and increases CPU and memory impact of Chrome significantly.

Slows down every request to every website substantially. I *always* see "waiting for extension Library Access" at the bottom when I open a new link.

Opens scite_ for no reason without permission, even when the entire extension is turned off. turns itself on again. extremely annoying.

Another problem with YouTube: the scroll bar disappears and you can't scroll at all. As with everyone else it took a good deal of turning extensions off and on to find it was Lean Library.

Hi guys, Great tool, but currently there is a bug that makes YouTube notifications disappear on the desktop site. The issue is confirmed to be with this extension. Please report bug to your official developer channels. I will update this review after it is fixed. A 5 star extension extension that needs a fix for students who also enjoy youtube (many people).

Overcomplicated SciWheel's original extension layout. At the time of writing this, the Google Chrome extension has once again stopped responding on all of my devices. This has been a reliable tool since I started using it 4 years ago and I recommended it to all of my coworkers, but I cannot in good faith do so until they fix the bugs they've introduced. I've got my qualifying exam in less than 3 weeks and I need to have my citations ironed out ASAP but this rebranding is making it incredibly difficult.

What an unfortunate loss of functionality from the SciWheel Extension. The Sciweel Extension let you add a paper you were reading to your projects, add tags, and notes, pretty seamlessly. When you added notes, you could click on the note and add additional information, color code your highlight, or delete the note without having to go through any additional steps. Now most of these actions require you to go through additional dropdown menus, and the process appears to also take longer, with a loading bar remaining on the screen after you've added your note. This was not the case before. The ability to add tags has been completely lost in the new extension, despite being one of the functionalities that added the most utility to the sciwheel extension before. Adding tags let me add more granularity to my reference sorting system, so that I could find which references specific to a certain project were important because they touched on a certain aspect of the project, had an interesting assay, or more. I can no longer specify that. When you add a paper to the project now, clicking the extension icon also no longer tells you what project the paper is in. Sadly one of the few complaints about the last extension, which was that you couldn't add your reference to multiple projects, has also not been improved. There was a popup that might have had some of the lost functionalities, but because it was always on and covered part of the screen, it *frequently* interrupted my ability to read through articles, so I had to disable it. A popup is just not an upgrade from a collapsible interface on my toolbar. Editing to add in that disabling the popup frequently reverts the setting. This user preference does not seem to be retained by the extension. This has been a significant step back on the utility sciwheel provided. It seems the developers are taking note of the disappointed feedback and will reintegrate some of these features, which I am thankful for. I've already noticed that the ability to edit notes has been readded, which was one of major complaints. That gives me hope, though it could still use refinement, because as I mentioned it adds additional steps that did not exist before. I initially gave 1 star because the notes functionality had been completely lost. I've increased to two as that functionality has returned, if albeit a bit less smooth than before. I'm thankful the developers are working to return some of SciWheels Functionality and hope the new extension can catch up with the utility of the legacy extension and maybe improve it more in the future.

In principle it works really well, but it clashes with Mendeley. When I login to Scopus using my University account, Lean Library is conflicting with that account as well. This prevents me from importing references to Mendeley from Scopus and consequently I have to pause the Lean Library extension.

Hi there, This was useful for a bit (although it often redirects me back to the same article?? And redirects me to an article when I'm already able to access the one that I'm currently viewing???) However A few days ago, it started interfering with the Google Translate website. Just now I went through all my extensions, disabling them one by one. I can confirm that this extension is the problem. In Translate, when I am typing, some of the letters don't pass through to the input box. From a bit of testing, it appears that something is causing the input box to lose input focus, approximately at 1Hz. Please check this out! I have no idea why an extension such as this would be doing such a thing with the input focus. Very strange. And, naturally, I cannot use it because Translate is a core part of my daily life. Thanks for this extension all the same, it is a useful concept. Judging by the other reviews, it seems that the code is not written well, cleanly, and/or it is badly designed because the kind of bugs people are mentioning just don't really align with a piece of software that is simply meant to provide access to academic papers! So, please go back and refactor the code, ensure that it isn't doing unnecessary functions, whatever whatever. I notice that the last update was on 25th July, so being 5 days ago, that would coincide with the beginning of this bug.

I am not sure what happened, but there must have been an update or something, as now there are just too many click and options to choose from. And when searching online odd search results keep popping up on my screen. All very confusing.

The pop-up and redirect are often mistimed or useless. For example, when browsing wikipedia on "Maxwell's equations" I don't need a message saying that "full text alternatives exist" with an option to access a textbook on Clifford algebras. Some redirects or log-ins are useless. For example, I have to disable the extension to access "https://authors.aps.org/" without being kicked into a redirect loop when trying to submit a paper for publication! I don't need a proxy to access the paper submission site. A similar issue (minus the redirect loop) occurs when reading open-access or free access articles: I don't need to be logged in to access these, so the redirect / log-in procedure is just a time waste. Finally, there are times when I arrive at a page I SHOULD have access to, and the extension sits there like a useless lump and does nothing, e.g. go to physical review E, click on the first interesting looking paywalled article, click the "pdf" option, and I'm told I don't have access.

Very useful for research and finding resources but slowed down my keyboard response on Google Chrome and made using Google Docs and other websites very laggy. Got so frustrating I unfortunately had to disable the extension. Very disappointing. If this issue were to be fixed, I'd redownload it.

For many papers, its shows the text "Full-Text Achieved You are currently on a Full Text article. Good luck studying!", while the full text isn't shown anywhere. There's no button anywhere on the page or in the plugin to view the full text. The full text certainly isn't displayed anywhere. The original paywall on the page is still in tact. I have seen this at many sites. The amount of times that the plugin actually provides a button to download the pdf is very limited. Please fix this bug. Otherwise this plugin is useless.

Slows down my browser when installed, so eventually uninstalled it. The extension kept taking me to my University page so that I can't browse on the publisher pages that I want to. Kept popping up with suggestions?? that I don't need. Avoid!

Very bad user experience. When turned on, this app also wants me to log in to access publicly available articles and Wikipedia pages! Every time I load a page, it takes me away from there to the login, so I have to keep it turned off so I can browse peacefully. Also, in some sites I have to log in 3 times to download an article.

Useful but uses up 500Mb+ of RAM on "idle". Almost as if this extension is mining crypto or something while it's installed and running.

Very useful extension, hence the extra stars, but makes the chrome browser extremely slow, hence only two.

Helpful app but you need to either change the default so that the access pop-up doesn't not come up unprompted OR provide users that option. More often than note, this pop-up is super annoying and it would be helpful to just be able to click the icon when you need help with institutional access to an article. Using most up to date version of chrome

It's a very strange extension. First, there is no way to selectively use it for specific pages. It often applies itself to pages when not needed, messing up the functionality of those pages. Then I need to go to Extensions settings to manually disable it altogether. Second, it does not work reliably. There are pages where it activates, I see the icon is green, but the content is still not available, or magazine web site still shows "sign in" and "subscribe" links. I am on the verge to remove it completely, but keeping just in case as a last resort.

Convenient when you need it but a huge pain when you don't. This extension makes accessing academic papers etc. easy, but if there if you have your own subscription to said material, this extension will almost always override your account causing HUGE headaches. E.g. I have a personal subscription to The Economist I cannot access without uninstalling this silly extension.

Unfortunately having the extension active used 70% of my CPU, making my fan shriek, my laptop overheat, and eventually chrome would stop responding. Disabled the extension and voila-- fan stopped and chrome went back to normal. Unfortunate because its a good idea for an extension and its a very useful too when it works (especially as a thesis-writing master's student). Too bad it uses all your CPU.

The plugin itself works quite well. The only issue I recently experience is that for instance YouTube is very slow and crashes often when the plugin is active. The browser uses a lot of memory as well then. I ckecked this behaviour with Chrome and Firefox on Windows and Mac. It happens in all situations. So now I have to inactivate the plugin and make it only active when I need it for library access.

Works well to integrate with university library but every time it updates I have to annoyingly re-disable integrations that I do not want on. 5 stars if they ever fix this problem.

It's a great tool for integrating our university library with the ever expanding plethora of ways to access articles and it really helps me do my job. As a downside though, it recently started bugging out Qualtrics where it trying to retrieve an article from the editing pane would then hide the entire page, making Qualtrics unusable. As I'm sure this tool is mostly used by academics, many of whom also use Qualtrics, I would love to see this fixed.