Thursday, August 21, 2014

Fresh Look of Scholar Profiles

Summer's at an end… while the predictions of the much needed (in California) El Niño may or may not prove accurate, the season's ripe to put a fresh coat of paint on the Scholar Citations profiles.

We're rolling out a complete visual refresh, along with several usability improvements. Your publications are taking the center stage, while their aggregate citation metrics are moving to the sidebar. The "Follow" button is graduating to a more prominent spot, to make it easier for your fellow researchers to keep up with your latest articles. Working with a long list of publications is becoming more straightforward — you can load up to a thousand articles onto a page; and the "Merge", "Delete", and "Export" buttons always stay within easy reach on top of the screen.



The new modern profiles are easy to read on just about any device: 3-inch phones, 10-inch tablets, 24-inch desktops, and everything in-between. Really, everything. I gave it a spin on eight desktop browsers, two laptops, six phones, and three tablets. The new layout is more compact, especially on the smaller screens, and the controls are now larger and more finger-friendly. Just like in Scholar search.



We've also made it easier to print a nice, clean version of your profile. Your browser's "print" button now removes the sidebar and the controls, and prints just the list of articles with a brief summary header. Pro tip: to print more than twenty articles, click "Show more" at the bottom of the profile. If you wish to repeat the table header on top of every page, you'll need to use Firefox or Internet Explorer to print your profile; current versions of Chrome and Safari only print the header on the first page.



Needless to say, this is an excellent time to review your Scholar Citations profile, and make sure your information is up to date. Perhaps you have moved to another university? Or made a new homepage? Or maybe you've configured manual updates of your publications, and haven't had a chance to review the update emails for months? We haven't changed any entries as part of this visual refresh — nor did we change your metrics, I hope, — but if you haven't updated your Scholar profile for some time, it'd be great to give it a quick look.Three quarters of Scholar search results pages currently show links to the authors' public profiles. Chances are that someone's looking at yours too.

Posted by: Alex Verstak, Software Engineer