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See journal quality on Google Scholar.

Google Scholar tells you how many times a paper was cited. It tells you nothing about where it was published. LitRank adds the quartile, the impact score and the open-access status to every result — then lets you turn a search into a research project.

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What Google Scholar leaves out

Scholar is the best place to find papers and the worst place to judge them. LitRank fills in the part that is missing, on the page you are already on.

Quartile at a glance

Q1 to Q4 on every result, from Scimago Journal Rank. One hue, stepped light to dark, so rank reads as rank rather than as colour-coding you have to learn.

Impact, and impact per year

The journal's SJR score and h-index — plus citations per year, because a 2004 paper with 400 citations is not outperforming a 2023 paper with 90.

Open access, before you click

Open-access and DOAJ indicators, a direct-PDF marker, and the country of publication — so you stop opening things you cannot read.

Filters Scholar does not have

Show only Q1 and Q2. Exclude preprints. Set a citation floor. Hide what you have already triaged. Sort by journal impact without losing Scholar's own order.

Projects, not one flat list

Save into named projects with their own icon and colour. One paper can belong to several. Each project reports its quartile mix, median impact and top venues.

Out to your reference manager

BibTeX, CSV or JSON from any project, with DOIs recovered where Scholar hid them. Fetch full metadata from Crossref, or batch-download the PDFs you can reach.

If more than one journal could fit, LitRank shows nothing rather than guessing.

Scholar abbreviates and truncates venue names, and a truncated name can match several real journals. 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 from the outside you cannot tell the two apart.

How it looks

Nothing to open, nothing to configure. Install it, and Google Scholar is simply better the next time you search.

Every result, ranked

Quartile, impact score, citation rate, open access and country — on the page you were already reading. The bar above filters what you see without leaving Scholar.

Google Scholar search results with LitRank badges: a Q1 quartile badge, SJR score, citations per year, open-access and PDF indicators and a country flag on each result, with a filter bar above the page.

An author's record, summarised

Profile pages get the same badges, plus a distribution of the loaded publications across quartiles and their median impact. One square per paper — you are counting, not estimating.

A Google Scholar author profile with LitRank badges on each publication and a quartile distribution bar summarising how many are Q1, Q2, Q3 and unranked.

A search becomes a project

Bookmark anything worth keeping into a named project. Each card shows how many papers it holds, how they spread across quartiles, and the median impact of the venues.

The LitRank dashboard showing research project cards, each with an icon, colour, paper count, quartile distribution bar and median SJR.

The whole project on one screen

Quartile mix, median impact, a publication-year histogram and the venues you are actually citing. Then export it, complete it from Crossref, or sync it to a folder.

A LitRank project detail view showing paper counts, median SJR, a publication-year histogram, a top-venues chart and the saved paper list.

Three steps, then never again

Install

Chrome, Edge or Firefox. No account, no sign-up, no configuration screen.

Search as usual

Open Google Scholar. Badges and the filter bar appear on results, profiles and Scholar Labs, across 30+ country domains.

Keep what matters

Bookmark into a project, then export BibTeX when you sit down to write.

There is no server

No account, no sync service, no analytics. Nothing you search for or read is transmitted anywhere, because there is nowhere for it to go.

Works with the network off

The ranking data ships inside the extension and is read on your own machine. The only outbound request is to Crossref, and only when you press Fetch metadata.

Free, and staying free

No paid tier, no trial, no advertising, no data sale. Built by Matily, a non-profit studio, and released under the GPL.

Questions people actually ask

Does LitRank show the Journal Impact Factor?
No. LitRank shows SJR quartiles — 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. If you specifically need JIF, LitRank is not the right tool.
Why does a paper show “Unranked”?
Because the venue could not be matched with confidence — not because it scored badly. Usually the venue is not a journal at all (preprints, theses and book chapters carry no quartile), or Google Scholar truncated the name past the point where it is still unique. Where more than one journal could fit, LitRank shows no badge rather than guessing. The badge tells you which case you are looking at.
Why do conference papers have no quartile?
Quartiles are assigned to journals, not to conference proceedings. Rather than invent a rank for a conference, LitRank shows its impact score and h-index instead.
Is my reading list stored in the cloud?
No. Everything stays in your browser's local storage. There is no account, no server and no sync service. You can export a project or save it to a folder on your own computer whenever you like, but nothing leaves your machine unless you ask it to.
Can I use it with Zotero, Mendeley or EndNote?
Yes. Export any project as BibTeX, CSV or JSON and import it. Records carry a DOI wherever one could be recovered, so your reference manager can complete anything Google Scholar did not show.
Does it work on Google Scholar author profiles?
Yes. Author profiles get the same per-publication badges, plus a summary of the loaded publications: how many are Q1, the median impact score, and the spread across quartiles. Scholar loads profiles in pages, so the summary always says how many publications it covers.
Does it slow Google Scholar down?
No. The ranking data is prepared once per page, off the critical path, and every lookup after that is instant.
Is LitRank free?
Yes, and it stays free. No paid tier, no trial, no advertising and no data sale. It is built by Matily, a non-profit software studio.
Is LitRank affiliated with Google?
No. LitRank is an independent extension. Google Scholar is a trademark of Google LLC.

Stop judging papers by citation count alone.

Install it once. The next time you search Google Scholar, you will know where everything was published.

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